“No claims, no trials, no compensation. Just roll up your sleeve”: social media communication on vaccine uptake sentiments in Canada

Social media platforms are data-rich sources of communication. We analysed 20,000 Canadian COVID vaccine tweets at two Canadian geographic and temporal levels of before and after vaccine arrivals in two provinces of British Columbia (BC) with the highest COVID vaccine uptake and Ontario (ON) with the lowest uptake. Using machine learning based sentiment analysis and topic modeling and drawing on framing theory, the positive and negative emotional sentiment were framed into actionable subframes to inform future vaccine propagation efforts. The vaccine negative sentiments that emerged were framed from a constellation of insecurities and categorized into four intertwined frames and themes: health information mavenism framed misinformation and conspiracy beliefs (20% and 16% post-vaccine reduction in BC and ON); constellation of insecurities framed antivaccine expressions and hesitancy (9% and 6% drop in BC and ON post- vaccine); pandemic of mistrust and opinions framed lack of faith and skepticism (post-vaccine arrival increased by 19% in BC and dropped by 6% in ON) and opinions and perceptions framed fear, death and worry (stable over time in BC and 20% increased in ON). Vaccine propagation efforts should consider over time disappearing misinformation and conspiracies while attentive to lingering conspiracies creating fears and worries of death.