A researcher has tried to find out why some Canadians are hesitant about getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
Janessa Griffith, a PhD candidate in medical science at the University of Toronto and Women’s College Hospital, led the research by turning to social media – Twitter in this case – to capture public discourse.
Using the search words “vaccine” and “COVID”, more than 3,900 tweets from public Twitter profiles in Canada were screened.
Overall, 605 tweets were identified as those about COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.
“Most of them were grouped into a few different themes and these were concerns about safety, political or economic skepticism, misunderstanding information and confusing messaging from authority figures,” notes Griffith.
Until now, little data has been available about the reasons behind vaccine hesitancy.
“I wanted to drill down and look at the nuances of what people are particularly hesitant about because knowing this we can better develop strategies to improve vaccine confidence,” she said.
In particular, Griffith hopes that decision-makers will find the research useful.
