[Vaccination counselling: The meeting point is possible]

Public attitudes on social media toward vaccination before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

With the success of COVID-19 vaccines in clinical trials, vaccination programs are being administered for the population with the hopes of herd immunity. However, the success of any vaccination program depends on the percentage of people willing to get vaccination which is influenced by social, economic, demographic, and vaccine-specific factors. Thus, it is important to understand public attitudes and perceptions toward vaccination. This study aims to measure public attitude toward vaccines and vaccinations before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, using public data from Twitter. A total of 880,586 tweets for 57,529 unique users were included in the study. Most of the tweets were posted in five languages: French, English, Swedish, Dutch, and Italian. These tweets were divided into two time periods: before COVID-19 (T1) and during COVID-19 (T2). This study observed the shift in the sentiments of the public attitude toward vaccines before and during COVID-19 pandemic. Both positive and negative shifts in sentiments were observed for the users of various languages but shifts toward positive sentiments were more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Continuing education programme on vaccines for primary healthcare professionals: mixed-method protocol

INTRODUCTION

Vaccination is a fundamental intervention in disease prevention; therefore, the advice and recommendations of health professionals have a major influence on the population's decision to be vaccinated or not. Professionals must have sufficient competencies to carry out their work and recommend vaccination with evidence-based knowledge. The aim is to design and validate a strategy to improve professional competencies in vaccination to positively influence adherence and increase vaccination rates in the population.

METHODS AND ANALYSIS

Training will be designed based on evidence and previous studies and piloted with healthcare providers. To test changes in knowledge, a pretest and post-test will be conducted. To test feasibility, a think-aloud method will be used with participants and triangulated with focus groups using SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Transfer will be measured using the questionnaire 'factors for the indirect evaluation of transfer' and an efficacy questionnaire 1½ months later; for satisfaction, an ad hoc questionnaire will be used. A summative approach will be used for the analysis of the focus groups and descriptive and bivariate statistics for the questionnaires.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION

This study was approved by the Andalusian Research Ethics Committee, Spain (approval number: 0524-N-20). The results will be made available to the public at journal publications and scientific conferences.

Carrasco M, Pinós L, Picchio CA, Rius C, Diez E. Vaccine hesitancy among paediatric nurses: Prevalence and associated factors

Objective

This study describes the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy associated with the Catalan systematic childhood vaccination calendar and some related psychosocial determinants among paediatric primary care nurses in Barcelona (Spain).

Methods

Cross-sectional descriptive study. In 2017 we invited the paediatric nurses (N = 165) working in Barcelona public primary health centres with paediatric departments (N = 41) to participate. They answered a questionnaire with sociodemographic and behavioural variables: severity and perceived probability of contracting the diseases of the vaccines in the vaccination schedule; safety and protection offered by each vaccine; and beliefs, social norms, and knowledge about vaccines. Outcome variable was vaccine hesitancy, dichotomized into not hesitant (nurses who would vaccinate their own offspring), and hesitant (including those who would not vaccinate them, those who had doubts and those who would delay the administration of one or more vaccines). We performed bivariate analysis and adjusted logistic regression models.

Results

83% of paediatric nurses (N = 137) agreed to participate. 67.9% had the intention to vaccinate their children of all the vaccines in the systematic schedule. 32.1% of nurses experienced vaccine hesitancy, especially about the HPV (21.9%) and varicella (17.5%) vaccines. The multivariate analysis suggests associations between hesitancy and low perception of the severity of whooping cough (aOR: 3.88; 95%CI:1.32–11.4), low perception of safety of the HPV vaccine (aOR:8.5;95%CI:1.24–57.8), the belief that vaccines are administered too early (aOR:6.09;95%CI:1.98–18.8), and not having children (aOR:4.05;95%CI:1.22–13.3).

Conclusions

Although most paediatric nurses had the intention to vaccinate their own children, almost one-third reported some kind of vaccine hesitancy, mainly related to doubts about HPV and varicella vaccines, as well as some misconceptions. These factors should be addressed to enhance nurses’ fundamental role in promoting vaccination to families.

Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Sentiment Analysis from June 2011 to April 2019

Vaccine hesitancy was one of the ten major threats to global health in 2019, according to the World Health Organisation. Nowadays, social media has an important role in the spread of information, misinformation, and disinformation about vaccines. Monitoring vaccine-related conversations on social media could help us to identify the factors that contribute to vaccine confidence in each historical period and geographical area. We used a hybrid approach to perform an opinion-mining analysis on 1,499,227 vaccine-related tweets published on Twitter from 1st June 2011 to 30th April 2019. Our algorithm classified 69.36% of the tweets as neutral, 21.78% as positive, and 8.86% as negative. The percentage of neutral tweets showed a decreasing tendency, while the proportion of positive and negative tweets increased over time. Peaks in positive tweets were observed every April. The proportion of positive tweets was significantly higher in the middle of the week and decreased during weekends. Negative tweets followed the opposite pattern. Among users with ≥2 tweets, 91.83% had a homogeneous polarised discourse. Positive tweets were more prevalent in Switzerland (71.43%). Negative tweets were most common in the Netherlands (15.53%), Canada (11.32%), Japan (10.74%), and the United States (10.49%). Opinion mining is potentially useful to monitor online vaccine-related concerns and adapt vaccine promotion strategies accordingly.