While health and safety guidelines have evolved over the course of the pandemic, there’s one thing experts agree on: COVID-19 vaccines are effective. However, some have expressed concern about the safety of receiving vaccines without FDA approval.
Last week, though, came some very encouraging news. After waiting what has felt like a lifetime, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine received full and final approval by the FDA on Aug. 23. Now being marketed as Comirnaty, individuals 16 and older may be eligible to receive the vaccine. The vaccine will continue to be available for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in select immunocompromised individuals.
We know what the experts are saying, but what has the conversation been like on social media? At the Social Media Listening Center, we used a search for keywords “Pfizer” and “FDA,” “Pfizer” and “FDA approval,” “Pfizer” and “COVID-19,” and “Pfizer.” While this is not a fully extensive search, it provides a glimpse into the online conversation.
On Aug. 23, when the news was announced, the search found more than 417.9K mentions. As of Aug. 28 at 11:59 pm, the search yielded 5,007,572 mentions. The sentiment of this search was 52.7% positive and 47.3% negative. However, when searching the keyword “Pfizer” alone, the sentiment was 44.7% positive and 55.3% negative. It is important to note that the sentiment analysis does not account for sarcasm. The keyword “COVID-19” is also often used as a negative word, making sentiment analysis more difficult to gauge. To get a better look at the conversation, we paid close attention to the word cloud capturing the most common words and phrases associated with our search:
To gain a better understanding of the sentiment surrounding the news, we looked at the most commonly used hashtags related to this search. We found that #covid19, #getvaccinated, #pfizer, and #breaking are at the top. When searching the keywords “Pfizer” and “FDA approval,” the search revealed that some of the top themes of discussion the day the news was announced were “Testing,” “Pfizer Vaccine,” and “FDA Answers to Big Pharma.”
Who exactly is engaging in this conversation? Unsurprisingly, on the day the news was announced, the overwhelming majority of the posts related to the keywords are from Twitter users in the 18-35 age demographic located in the United States. Top influencers on Twitter include The New York Times, ABC News, Anderson Cooper 360°, and President Biden.
The FDA has officially approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. While all three COVID vaccines have met FDA's strict standards for emergency use, this FDA approval should give added confidence that this vaccine is safe and effective.
If you're not vaccinated yet, now is the time. https://t.co/XaxFdWHbRc
— President Biden (@POTUS) August 23, 2021
The Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine gets full FDA approval. It's a major opportunity to encourage more shots in arms — and could mean more mandates. https://t.co/VXsxUitJoW
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) August 23, 2021
The keyword search also revealed that Reddit users are engaging in the r/News, r/Politics, r/Conservative, and r/Libertarian subreddits. Several posts were made in support of vaccine mandates and linked to outside news sources, including The Guardian. One of the most popular posts in r/News received 94.2k upvotes, 269 awards, and over 11K comments.
Since the news was announced on Aug. 23, the volume trend of conversation has declined pretty quickly. However, this does not mean the conversation is over. It seems that overall, the world recognizes that the FDA approval is a step in the right direction to defeat COVID-19 and protect the general population. While there are still plenty of split opinions, we’ll continue monitoring this topic and others from the Social Media Listening Center.
Author: Kendall Phillips
