Understanding vaccine narratives: the what, why, and how
What can nearly 150,000 public comments tell us about vaccine opposition? This study pairs AI topic modeling with human interpretation to examine the concerns, beliefs, and persuasive strategies in comments about authorizing COVID-19 vaccines for children.
Read the research paper ↗The central insight: a vaccine argument has more than a factual claim. The study also identifies the worldview beneath it and the way it is made persuasive—a useful framework for listening to audiences and designing health communication.
Three ways to read an argument
Choose a domain, then select a theme below to see what the researchers found. The framework separates the content of a claim from the beliefs and persuasive techniques around it.
Number of model topics assigned to each theme · Tables 1–3
Select a bar to explore its meaning. A topic can belong to more than one theme.
How to read these counts: each bar counts model topics, not people or comments. The themes overlap, so the bars cannot be added to estimate prevalence. Labels such as “Unsafe” describe commenters’ arguments; they are not findings about vaccine effects.
Why this matters for health communication
The paper argues that responding to a specific concern is only one part of the task. Communication also needs to engage with the trust, values, and rhetorical strategies shaping how a message is received.
These communication implications come from a descriptive analysis of public comments.
How the study was done
From comments to a framework
The authors analyzed comments submitted to two FDA regulatory dockets in October 2021 and February 2022, concerning vaccine authorization for ages 5–11 and 6 months–4 years. After removing exact duplicates, they used topic modeling to group recurring language, then interpreted those groups through collaborative thematic and discourse analysis.
What the study can tell us
This is a study of discourse in self-selected public comments during two specific periods. It helps characterize vaccine opposition; it does not estimate how common these views were among parents or the general public.
Full methods and findings · Authors’ data and methods on OSF · About this interactive version