Peer-reviewed article
Negative vaccine sentiments on South African social media platforms before the COVID-19 pandemic: a mixed methods study.
Matsangaise MM, Burnett RJ, Ismail Z, Meyer JC ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examined negative vaccine sentiments expressed on South African social media platforms between December 2016 and May 2017, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers analyzed over 10,000 posts about vaccines and found that 16.2% expressed negative sentiments, with HPV vaccines receiving the most criticism. The negative posts commonly referenced vaccine safety concerns, autism claims, effectiveness doubts, conspiracy theories, and religious objections, often linking to articles from outside South Africa. The findings provide a baseline to understand how vaccine hesitancy may have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Key points
- 16.2% of 10,997 vaccine-related social media posts expressed negative sentiments in the pre-pandemic period
- HPV vaccines attracted the most negative sentiments, accounting for 31.9% of all negative posts
- Five main themes in negative posts: vaccine safety, autism, vaccine effectiveness, conspiracy theories, and philosophical/religious objections
- 35.9% of posts discussed specific vaccines
- Majority of negative posts included links to articles from other countries, predominantly the USA
Limitations
This study only examines social media sentiment during a specific pre-pandemic period and does not measure actual vaccine uptake or health outcomes among children. The findings reflect online discourse rather than population-level attitudes or behavior.
Abstract
Introduction During the pre-pandemic era, negative vaccine sentiments did not feature in South African publications reporting on infant vaccination uptake. In contrast, vaccine hesitancy is an established driver of suboptimal COVID-19 vaccine uptake in South Africa, suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic increased vaccine hesitancy in South Africa. This study used data from a social media tracking project to investigate vaccine sentiment expressed on South African social media platforms in the pre-pandemic era. Methods This mixed-methods study analysed South African social media [Twitter (now X); online news forums; microblogs] posts mentioning vaccine-related words from 1 December 2016-31 May 2017. Content analysis was used to assign vaccine sentiment, and thereafter a step-wise thematic content analysis of negative sentiment posts was conducted using NVivo12®. Results Of 10,997 posts about human vaccines, 16.2% expressed negative vaccine sentiments. Specific vaccines were discussed in 35.9% of posts, with human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines attracting the most negative sentiments (31.9% of all negative posts). The majority of negative posts included links to articles emanating from other countries, predominantly the USA. Five themes were identified: Vaccine safety; autism; vaccine effectiveness; conspiracy theories; and philosophical/religious objections. Discussion Relatively high levels of pre-existing negative sentiments toward vaccines were expressed in the pre-pandemic era, with HPV vaccines attracting the most negative comments. These results provide a baseline for comparison to post-pandemic social media studies and may prove useful for measuring the impact in South Africa of global policies introduced to limit the spread of vaccine mis- and disinformation.