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lorenagbarberia

26 May, 17 tweets, 14 min read

@RedePesquisa

This week, we released a new policy brief at @RedePesquisa. We examine the scope and depth of attacks on the CoronaVac vaccine by @jairbolsonaro and politicians in social media. We show that the negative posts occurred in key weeks and may affect vaccination in 🇧🇷. Follow this 🧵

@Twitter

Throughout 2020 and 2021, the increase in the absolute volume of CoronaVac-related @Twitter activity was driven by attacks against the vaccine. Between September 29 and November 14 (epidemiological weeks 39 and 46), there was an escalation in the frequency of CoronaVac tweets.

@Twitter

Concomitantly, we also detected an increase in publications attacking the CoronaVac vaccine on @Twitter. Here we show the volume of anti-CoronaVac posts in dark blue.

As we show, CoronaVac negative tweets dominated in key epidemiological weeks in 2020 which coincided when the Fase 3 clinical trial was underway. As we all know, the speed and success of clinical trials is key to the development of vaccines.

@Twitter

Evolution of CoronaVac @Twitter posts between September and November 2020 (epidemiological weeks 39 and 46). Clusters in different colors - pro-CoronaVac posts in green; anti-Coronavac posts in blue; and neutral or non-categorized posts in pink in these directed network graphs.

@Twitter

The bold twitter IDs in the blue-shaded cluster are those individuals who generated negative tweets against CoronaVac receiving likes by many individuals, and also re-tweeted on @Twitter in select epidemiological weeks. Here are further directed network graphs.

Individuals including state and federal congressional representatives were active in the digital debate on CoronaVac by tweeting messages that questioned the vaccine's efficacy, side effects, and associating its Chinese origin. Does it matter? Yes! Vaccine hesitancy rose !

There have been 5 delays in the delivery of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (IFA) from China that are required for CoronaVac doses resulting in a deficit of 7 thousand liters of IFA (10.5 million vaccine doses)+ 4 thousand liters of IFA in transit to Brazil.

Using the updated itinerary provided by the Ministry of Health and considering the delays in IFA deliveries from China to the Butantan Institute, there is a deficit of 12 million doses that should have already been distributed to the unified health system (SUS).

Furthermore, as we show, that the decline in the supply of this vaccine affected the speed of vaccination of the 1st administered dose of CoronaVac, which was the primary vaccine used in Brazil since the onset.

The problems have become even more serious when we examine those receiving a 2nd administered dose of the vaccine, which is essential to guarantee full immunization.

Social media has played an important role during COVID-19. We hope this policy brief helps journalists, policymakers and society to understand the implications and part of the reason why 🇧🇷today is continues to face high numbers of infections and deaths.