Unveiling Public Perceptions: Machine Learning-Based Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Vaccines in India
This addresses public health communication issues for policymakers in India, but it is incremental as it applies standard sentiment analysis to a new dataset.
The study tackled the problem of understanding public sentiment towards COVID-19 vaccines in India by analyzing Reddit data, finding that most users expressed neutrality, which challenges vaccination efforts.
In March 2020, the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic as it spread to nearly every country. By mid-2021, India had introduced three vaccines: Covishield, Covaxin, and Sputnik. To ensure successful vaccination in a densely populated country like India, understanding public sentiment was crucial. Social media, particularly Reddit with over 430 million users, played a vital role in disseminating information. This study employs data mining techniques to analyze Reddit data and gauge Indian sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccines. Using Python's Text Blob library, comments are annotated to assess general sentiments. Results show that most Reddit users in India expressed neutrality about vaccination, posing a challenge for the Indian government's efforts to vaccinate a significant portion of the population.