COVID-19 Vaccine Response on Social Media Using LDA Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic causes an enormous interruption to human activity. Vaccines were developed at breathtaking speed and the global community was quick to react to their deployment. The primary focus of this paper is to analyze the global population’s response to the vaccine rollout during the December 2020 to November 2021 phase of the pandemic. To achieve this objective, we use a dataset of tweets written in response to the vaccines using the various vaccine names as the search hashtag. The data was cleaned and tokenized then the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling algorithm was applied. Through analysis of Twitter data, it was possible to identify countries actively participating in vaccination efforts, the involved companies, and political leaders who were vocal on this topic. Two particular vaccines were discussed the most, Moderna and Covaxin. The LDA analysis shows a cluster of similar topics discussing the technical aspect of the vaccines and two distinct topics about the political and social aspect of the vaccine rollouts.