Covid-19 Vaccines & Therapeutics Twitter Surveillance for the Week of Mar 27, 2022

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Covid-19 in the news this week

Daily sentiment

Net daily sentiment ranged from -26.21 for Remdesivir on Monday the 28th to 24.41 for Monoclonal antibodies on Sunday the 27th.

The sentiment for each tweet is scored from -1 (most negative) to +1 (most positive) using VADER sentiment analysis. Net sentiment is calculated by summing the sentiment across all tweets for a given day and/or category, then normalizing the score by the number of tweets.

daily sentiment for tweets discussin Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics published between 2022-03-27 and 2022-04-02


Medical conditions from the MedDRA dictionary

Infection was the most frequently observed medical condition mentioned. Blindness, Blind had the highest overall net sentiment of -0.09. Poisoning had the lowest net sentiment this week (-50.43).

medical condition count sentiment
Infection 313 -3.56
Hearing loss 238 -29.92
Blindness, Blind 114 -0.09
Sickness 89 -32.11
Flu 50 -28.11
Cancer 45 -43.78
Poisoning 35 -50.43
Tinnitus 34 -17.56
Forgetfulness 33 -8.95
Coldness, Cold 28 -11.22

MedDra is a standardized medical terminology developed by the International Council for Harmonization Cross-referencing tweets against this list is a starting point for identifying medical conditions mentioned in tweets.


Cross-referencing the MedDRA dictionary by sentiment and topic

Positive tweets:

There were 284 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Blindness, Blind, (3) Sickness, (4) Flu, (5) Forgetfulness, (6) MS, (7) Coldness, Cold, (8) Coughing, Cough, (9) Hearing loss, (10) Pneumonia. Of these terms, MS (n=9), Coughing, Cough (n=7), Pneumonia (n=6) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.

Meddra conditions associated with positive tweets about Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics published between 2022-03-27 and 2022-04-02

Negative tweets:

There were 665 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Hearing loss, (2) Infection, (3) Sickness, (4) Blindness, Blind, (5) Cancer, (6) Poisoning, (7) Flu, (8) Tinnitus, (9) Forgetfulness, (10) Fever. Of these terms, Fever (n=13) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.

Meddra conditions associated with negative tweets about Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics published between 2022-03-27 and 2022-04-02


Word-level analysis

The 25 most important words within positive tweets (compared to negative and neutral) tweets are shown in the treemap below. The size of each box represents the weighted score of each word. The word “hors” within the search for “Ivermectin” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, Ivermectin had the highest overall weight.

words associated with positive tweets about Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics published between 2022-03-27 and 2022-04-02

The 25 most important words within negative tweets (compared to positive and neutral) tweets are shown in the treemap below. The word “peopl” within the search for “Ivermectin” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, “Ivermectin” had the highest overall weight within negative tweets.

words associated with negative tweets about Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics published between 2022-03-27 and 2022-04-02

This analysis of words evaluates the stemmed version of words using the Snowball algorithm. By stemming words, words with similar meaning, such as pain, painful & pained, are grouped together as simply “pain”.


Beta: text classification

Tweets that describe adverse events/side effects (first person point of view)

tweet search topic(s) medical condition(s) mentioned
_singing I’ve been poorly with covid last week. Ivermectin took away the fever, heavy chest and body aches. Left me with a runny nose <U+0001F44D><U+0001F3FB> ivermectin Ache, Fever, Runny nose
Within 10 minutes of getting the Pfizer vaccine, I got vertigo and nausea and within 15 minutes I had hives all over me. The doctor and ambulance officer got the rash under control but as soon as I got home I had a fever, chills and felt very unwell. pfizer vaccine Chills, Fever, Fever chills, Hives, Nausea, Rash, Vertigo
Explain my case then. Confirmed Covid, all symptoms. Started Wednesday. Confirmed Thursday. (Bed ridden from Wednesday night to Saturday morning.)

Takes ivermectin Friday night**

Saturday morning up and walking around no fever. Not a single symptom. (I still stayed home.)

ivermectin Fever
I got Moderna vaccine. I had some lines of fever after 24 hours, all three times. After the 2nd shot I felt worse than the previous one, but it was hot (July), I felt a sort of discomfort due to heat too… moderna vaccine Discomfort, Fever
I got covid, took ivermectin and my symptoms of fever and chills were gone after the first day. #ivermectinworks #dontbelievethelibs ivermectin Chills, Fever
I had a high fever for 36 hours. Needed Paracetamol. Arthritic pain in joints for one week. I don’t suffer from arthritis. Lymph nodes in left armpit sore. Delirious. Moderna vaccine. Third booster. Very strong; worth it though…<U+2764><U+FE0F>. moderna vaccine Arthritis, Delirious, Fever, Pain
I TOOK THE J&amp;J VACCINE &amp; EVER SINCE THAT NIGHT I HAVE BEEN FIGHTING FOR MY LIFE(DISABLED)! NOW I AM FIGHTING FOR MY LIFE 2 WAYS! SICK &amp; BROKE! johnson and johnson vaccine Sickness
Day 4 of Covid, I feel worse then,1-2, same as yesterday! Getting Monoclonal antibodies this afternoon,praying they work! Symptoms are, cough, runny nose, irritated throat, headache, and mild SOB with exertion! Oh and looking like shit:-( monoclonal antibodies Coughing, Cough, Headache, Irritability, Irritable, Runny nose
FYI this was me, I got really sick last summer so I ended up just getting a full dose of Moderna in the fall. johnson and johnson vaccine Fall, Sickness
yesterday i went to the doctor and instead of giving me the pfizer vaccine for covid19, he gave me a blue pfizer pill. my symptoms are now worse &amp; i’ve been feeling constant stiffness in my upper thigh region! pfizer vaccine Stiffness
Ivermectin does work and I am proof! I had Covid and was suffering from fever, body aches and a horrible migraine for days before I got ivermectin. All those symptoms were gone same day after first dosage! It also helped my family!! ivermectin Ache, Fever, Migraine
So nothing else ? No ivermectin, no vitamin d, nothing ? A relative of mine had covid when delta was on the wave. Had 2 weeks of flu symptoms and some intense migraines. That was it. I was in the same room for days and even drank from the same cup. I never had covid. ivermectin Flu, Flu symptoms, Migraine
Ok I’m vaccinated/ I had Covid. Took monoclonal antibodies infusion. It saved me. N 24 hrs I was fine. 8 months later Covid positive &amp; I was out of town – by 3rd day I was really sick – on 3rd day took ivermectin I think 3 pills, no worse next day continued I think 4days &amp; well ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies Sickness
My dad got the Moderna Vaccine and went back to get 2 boosters in a month!!! It is said to have fetal tissue used in the production! Within 6 weeks he and neighbors went together at the same time ALL OF THEM had extreme leg weakness and severe pain in joints! All are now dead !! moderna vaccine Pain, Weakness
Knowles “My lungs are full of blood clots and heart’s under stress. “My new normal [is] now having a pulmonologist doctor, cardiologist doctor, blood tests, full-body scans, ultrasounds…I wish I had never gotten it and I could have my healthy body back.” pfizer vaccine Stress
I had my 4th dose of Pfizer vaccine yesterday. I’m very achy today with a sore arm, and a low fever. The same as the last 3 times. I’m still glad I got it! I was going to switch to Moderna, but my oldest daughter had a bad reaction to it so I didn’t want to take the chance. <U+262E><U+FE0F> pfizer vaccine Fever
I haven’t had the 1st booster. I know I’m not having a 2nd. The original, (moderna), vaccine made me so sick, there is no way I’ll have anymore. moderna vaccine Sickness
_nyc Knowles “My lungs are full of blood clots and heart’s under stress. “My new normal [is] now having a pulmonologist doctor, cardiologist doctor, blood tests, full-body scans, ultrasounds…I wish I had never gotten it and I could have my healthy body back.” pfizer vaccine Stress
My initial infection, my Pfizer vaccine, and my moderna booster defending my thin delicate little body from the constant attempts by Miss Rona to ravage it again pfizer vaccine Infection
I wouldn’t be here without Remdesivir. I’m immunocompromised and got covid, double pneumonia and was failing fast. Remdesivir brought me back and allowed me to breath again. I was a no vaxxer until it saved my life. Just sayin…. remdesivir Pneumonia

This classifier was trained on a set of tweets manually reviewed and tagged. The classifier was trained using GloVe, a pretrained word embedding layer.

References

Webpage created in R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18) and R Studio (Version 1.4.1717) using the following packages: plotly, kableExtra, formattable, treemap, and wordpressr.

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  • Martijn Tennekes (2021). treemap: Treemap Visualization. R package version 2.4-3.
  • Simit Patel (2021). wordpressr: An API Wrapper for WordPress Site APIs. R package version 0.1.0.
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