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

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