Public Perspective on the Adverse Effects of Covid-19 Vaccines: A Study based on Social Media

Abstract

The worldwide pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV- 2) has afflicted the majority of the world’s population. Thanks to the invention of COVID-19 vaccines, the governments worldwide have been able to control the pandemic in some way. However, it can be noted that the majority of people are hesitant to share their experiences on official platforms after being vaccinated. As a result, information about vaccine-related adverse effects other than clinical trial results has become challenging to identify. However, many people tend to share their opinions about vaccines through social media platforms since the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns started worldwide. This study aims to identify the public perspective on the adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines, based on an analysis of social media data. As an initial step, the researchers tried to detect valid Tweets that contained details on adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines. Tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines were collected through the Kaggle repository, which resulted in over 4257 tweets after data cleaning and removing duplicates. Collected tweets were manually labeled into two categories: tweets related to the adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines and tweets not related to the adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines. After the data pre-processing, Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) word embedding technique were used to classify the COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets. The TF-IDF technique was used to extract features from the text that can be input into SVM. The best performance of classification, which used SVM, yielded an accuracy of 80.00 % on the test dataset. The recall, precision, and F1-score were 0.85, 0.41, and 0.56 respectively. Overall, this research reveals that the SVM algorithm can be used to identify the information related to COVID-19 vaccines on social media to explore public opinion about its adverse effects.