Covid-19 Vaccines & Therapeutics Twitter Report for the Week of August 7, 2022

Covid-19 in the news this week

DrugVisual Covid-19 links

Daily sentiment

Net daily sentiment ranged from -35.15 for Remdesivir on Thursday the 11th to 18.49 for Moderna vaccine on Sunday the 7th.

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 2022-08-07 and 2022-08-13


Medical conditions from the MedDRA dictionary

Infection was the most frequently observed medical condition mentioned. Blindness, Blind had the highest overall net sentiment of 4. Kidney failure had the lowest net sentiment this week (-66.03).

medical condition count sentiment
Infection 71 -5.43
Sickness 36 -21.93
Flu 33 -37.41
Cancer 24 -33.51
Coldness, Cold 21 -16.32
Pneumonia 18 -16.77
Blindness, Blind 15 4.00
Forgetfulness 14 -13.43
Fever 13 -9.93
Kidney failure 13 -66.03

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 104 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Pneumonia, (3) Flu, (4) Sickness, (5) Cancer, (6) Coldness, Cold, (7) Fever, (8) MS, (9) Blindness, Blind, (10) Fall. Of these terms, MS (n=5), Fall (n=3) 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 2022-08-07 and 2022-08-13

Negative tweets:

There were 176 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Flu, (3) Sickness, (4) Cancer, (5) Kidney failure, (6) Coldness, Cold, (7) Pain, (8) Pneumonia, (9) Fear, (10) Forgetfulness. Of these terms, Pain (n=9), Fear (n=7) 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 2022-08-07 and 2022-08-13


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 “like” within the search for “Ivermectin” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, Moderna vaccine had the highest overall weight.

words associated with positive tweets about Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics published between 2022-08-07 and 2022-08-13

The 25 most important words within negative tweets (compared to positive and neutral) tweets are shown in the treemap below. The word “death” 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 2022-08-07 and 2022-08-13

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
20 hours post 2nd booster moderna vaccine updates: left arm feels soreee also i should avoid moving left arm.. but dizziness not really bothering anymore, appetite finally back to normal (bcs last night suddenly i feel so hungry??) moderna vaccine Dizziness, Dizzy
I tested positive for COVID on Saturday after I woke up with full body aches feeling like I got hit by a truck. I did my regemin of Ivermectin, D3, C and Zinc and am feeling better and better. ivermectin Ache
Covid update – monoclonal antibodies in. Stuffy. Coughing. Fatigue . Soooo tired. No fever . No body aches. Did I mention tired? Cause soooo tired . Glad I’m boosted . Could be worse . monoclonal antibodies Ache, Coughing, Cough, Fatigue, Fever
So,yesterday. I went to get a boster shot, I showed my card. I got the J&amp;J vaccine, but. The poeple told me that, for some reason. That vaccine, doesn’t count. So I had to start all over, I got pfizer. Now I feel sick, I feel like I have a hangover <U+0001F922> johnson and johnson vaccine Feeling sick, Hangover, Sickness
I’m like doing the Lord’s work like dealing with like manic episodes depression loneliness a fever from the moderna vaccine anxiety and stress…like um….I want my Mom! moderna vaccine Anxiety, Fever, Manic, Stress
Flint got his first dose of the #Pfizer vaccine on Feb. 1, 2021. “Within 30 minutes, I developed a severe burning headache at the base of my skull and blurred vision. After a few hours, the pain was constant, but didn’t seem to be getting worse.” pfizer vaccine Blurred vision, Burn, Headache, Pain
Despite all the collateral effects I had on my cardiovascular health first. Being positive now it’s true I was vaccinated, but I got no fever and I’m mostly fine. Last summer post Moderna vaccine I had to check my heart rate cause it was spiking up, my period and my weight moderna vaccine Fever
I am unvaxxed. Had covid a year ago. It lasted for less than a week because my doctor got me HCQ and Ivermectin, milder than any cold Ive had and havent had a problem since. BEST DECISION IN MY LIFE WAS NOT GETTING VAXXED ivermectin Coldness, Cold
I took 1 Ivermectin dose bi weekly. Family had covid. I got a sore throat tested +. Took another dose. Played tennis the next day. One day and done. ivermectin Sore throat
I hate shots so I just got the one J&amp;J vaccine about 15 months ago. Have covid now and temp is 104. Throat feels worse than strep. Waking up drenched in sweat. If this shit’s here to stay, I don’t think I can deal with this level of sickness again and again. I’m 37 johnson and johnson vaccine Sickness, Sweating
1/ 9yr old little girl dead from the jab. Death after 2-3 days of stomach ache, sore throat and chest pain; two weeks after receiving the vaccination

But it’s just a coincidence…. #WakeUpAmerica

pfizer vaccine Ache, Chest pain, Pain, Sore throat, Stomach ache
Took my 4th dose of the Pfizer vaccine yesterday. Started having fever, chills and a headache today, ugh. This episode of post vaccine symptoms seems to be my most significant yet out of 4 doses. pfizer vaccine Chills, Fever, Fever chills, Headache
Informed that Pfizer vaccine could result in frozen shoulder. So I f**king earned that kendo kyu grading with excruciating shoulder pain <U+26A1><U+FE0F>Now this to conquer this Covid-induced asthma. pfizer vaccine Asthma, Frozen shoulder, Pain, Shoulder pain
I think I told this story once but I’ll tell it again: I got the j&amp;j vaccine. One of the scariest experiences of my life, I felt like I was going to die, I was shaking in my bed and it wasn’t from being cold. I woke up with a 100 degree fever, I then turned on the news to see… johnson and johnson vaccine Coldness, Cold, Fever, Shaking
22 hours post 2nd booster moderna vaccine updates: the fatigue faded but here im being a couch potato with a bowl porridge and noodle soup <U+0001F35C> (this is the most bold side effects on me bcs from 1st – 3rd shot ive never felt side effects that affect my mobility) moderna vaccine Fatigue
My life and health were saved by three doses of the Pfizer vaccine. Thank you Pfizer scientists for saving my life! But I had a very painful autoimmune reaction to the covid spike protein, especially the first vaccine. I had no side effects after being infected. 1/2 pfizer vaccine Infection, Pain
I lasted 5 days in the house taking care of my Covid infected family before I finally starting feeling sick yesterday morning. Woke up in the night with a 103.7 temp shivering and sweaty. Apparently an unmarked van is coming to give me monoclonal antibodies??

Wu-Tang!!

monoclonal antibodies Feeling sick, Infection, Shivers, Shivering, Sickness
-got CRS-2 months after. Not a variant but COVID SARS2 and I’ve never been that sick in my life! I didn’t feel right 2 mths after and my dr said I had long COVID and gave me hydroxychloroquine, and it knocked it right out of me! He asked me how come I didn’t see him when I had- hydroxychloroquine Sickness
I had no vax, no boosters, had covid, felt like a sinus infection, doctor prescribed ivermectin, felt better in 24 hrs. Tested neg. Within 10 days. ivermectin Infection, Sinus infection, Sinusitis
In January I came down with Covid even after having taken the necessary precautions, thanks to my idiot, ivermectin sucking, previous employer. I was the most sick I have ever been in a while, and I am sure that if I hadn’t been vaxxed, I would’ve been hospitalized. ivermectin Sickness

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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  • Kun Ren and Kenton Russell (2021). formattable: Create ‘Formattable’ Data Structures. R package version 0.2.1.
  • 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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