Assessing Vaccination Sentiments with Online Social Media: Implications for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Control

Abstract

There is great interest in the dynamics of health behaviors in social networks and how they affect collective public health outcomes, but measuring population health behaviors over time and space requires substantial resources. Here, we use publicly available data from 101,853 users of online social media collected over a time period of almost six months to measure the spatio-temporal sentiment towards a new vaccine. We validated our approach by identifying a strong correlation between sentiments expressed online and CDC-estimated vaccination rates by region. Analysis of the network of opinionated users showed that information flows more often between users who share the same sentiments - and less often between users who do not share the same sentiments - than expected by chance alone. We also found that most communities are dominated by either positive or negative sentiments towards the novel vaccine. Simulations of infectious disease transmission show that if clusters of negative vaccine sentiments lead to clusters of unprotected individuals, the likelihood of disease outbreaks is greatly increased. Online social media provide unprecedented access to data allowing for inexpensive and efficient tools to identify target areas for intervention efforts and to evaluate their effectiveness.

Author Summary

Sentiments about vaccination can strongly affect individual vaccination decisions. Measuring such sentiments - and how they are distributed in a population - is typically a difficult and resource-intensive endeavor. We use publicly available data from Twitter, a popular online social media service, to measure the evolution and distribution of sentiments towards the novel influenza A(H1N1) vaccine during the second half of 2009, i.e. the fall wave of the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic. We find that projected vaccination rates based on sentiments expressed on Twitter are in very good agreement with vaccination rates estimated by the CDC with traditional phone surveys. Looking at the online social network, we find that both negative and positive opinions are clustered, and that an equivalent level of clustering of vaccinations in a population would strongly increase disease outbreak risks.