There is still a lack of understanding who are those who object vaccination, be it in the case of the coronavirus or other infectious disease.
So this recent study is interesting, examining how anti- and not-anti-vaccination individuals speak on twitter:
There seems to be a slight trend towards "sanctity" in relation with vaccination-rejection, while not-anti-vaccination comes with more positive bias in "care" and "fairness". But are those differences defining? Well, they are significant, strong not really...
So this is a highly interesting study examining communications on twitter of pro- & anti-vaccination individuals; it remains yet unclear what is the defining difference...
Comments (see study also): on twitter only, not country-specific, account-sampling had to be in part manual
I wonder what it is about state-enforced lockdowns and mandatory vaccination that makes these science-denying CHUDs get all political.
@christian_zerfass
Boosted b/c papers are interesting, though their attitude is not empathetic.
> A Python Package to Detect Anti-Vaccine Users on Twitter
Is dangerously close in tone to "We're now able to make a list of people who, if mass-arrested, would probably end the pandemic", which...
1. That kind of talk is not going to build social cohesion
2. Making lists of people has a bad historical reputation
Not only that, they lump people who are critical of Covid vaccines with people who are against vaccines in general.
The first group is orders of magnitude larger than the second.
There are *many* people who are vaccinated with traditional vaccines and are however concerned about the lack of long-term safety studies of the Covid vaccines.
I agree on that point. I also was a bit shocked of providing such analytical tool, which would not have been necessary for a science publication (granted that the dataset access requires the academic API). The title in particular does not seem neutral at all.
I found the aplroach interesting, but... yet inconclusive from what is presented...
@christian_zerfass
I confess, I hit the boost button because your interpretation was quite interesting, then I clicked and had a "woah" moment.
I think at this point this one is going to have to get filed under "science is broken".
And this introduces an even bigger problem, because it starts becoming reasonable to ask: "who among these scientists would blow the whistle if the pharma companies DID try to push through an unsafe vaccine"...
And again you have my agreement 🙂 Me as a biochemist, I welcomed the development of a vaccine - and hated how some promoted it as a "miracle cure" as much as others making false claims about it to arhue for rejection.
In the end, it is a pharmaceutical intervention, which we should use to respond to diseases - but always with care and diligence.
@christian_zerfass
We need more scientists like yourself.
We need a critical society that seeks enlightenment 🙂
What Matheus Schmitz, Goran Muric, and Keith Burghardt made is mass surveillance tech.
people have the right to believe stupid things because no one can correctly judge what is stupid 100% of the time
Do some math for me, baby! If the vaccine is only effective at creating the qualitatively "milder" cases of Covid with the exact same viral loads, how does that stop the spread? I really want to see the math.
Maybe a major finding here is that anti-vaccination individuals seem to refer more often to politics in general, while pro-vacc individuals may have an attention to coronavirus-related topics. Though, as the authors warn, the latter at least may be a consequence from sampling