Vaccines in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Geography and Tone of Global Vaccine Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

We measure how vaccines and vaccination were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 1,097,930 de-duplicated vaccine articles, and set that coverage beside 176,001 research papers (2015–2025) and 27,649 patent families (2015–2024) on vaccines. Six results stand out: A single wave. Vaccines took 333.85 of every 10,000 news articles in 2021, 18.15 times their 2019 share. The peak month was March 2021, at 407.51 per 10,000, 22.2 times the 2019 annual average. A higher floor. By 2025 the share had fallen 91.8% from 2021, to 27.48 per 10,000. That is still 1.49 times the 2019 share, and 1.27 times the 2024 share. Urgent but not unusually negative. 81.3% of vaccine articles carry a critical priority label (all news: 42.6%). Their negative share (36.8%) is close to that of all news (33.6%). Geography. The United States holds 54.01% of located vaccine news, at a lift of 1.12. India holds 8.75%, at 0.66. Africa (1.78) and South America (1.76) are the most over-represented continents. Within India, Telangana (2.1), Kerala (1.39) and Himachal Pradesh (1.36) lead; within the United States, New Mexico (4.69), Rhode Island (3.15) and Louisiana (3.03). Shifting attention. From 2023 to 2025, vaccine news rose 1.78-fold as a share of American news and fell to 0.6 times its 2023 level in India. In the United States, 55.2% of vaccine articles were negative, against 33.1% of all American news. Research and invention. Vaccine papers rose from 16.91 per 10,000 papers in 2019 to 46.23 in 2022, then fell to 26.46 in 2025. Vaccine patent families grew 1.59-fold from 2015 to 2024; China's office holds 37.9% of office filings.