Changes in legislator vaccine-engagement on Twitter before and after the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Widespread SARS-CoV-2 vaccine uptake will be critical to resolution of the COVID-19 pandemic. Politicians have the potential to impact vaccine sentiment and uptake through vaccine-related communication with the public. We used tweets (n = 6,201), abstracted from Quorum, a public affairs software platform, to examine changes in the frequency of vaccine-related communication by legislators on the social media platform, Twitter. We found an increase in vaccine-related tweets by legislators following the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States. In the pre-COVID-19 era the majority of vaccine-related tweets were generated by Democrat and state senators. The increase in tweets following the arrival of COVID-19, however, was greater among Republican and federal legislators than Democrat or state legislators. This suggests that legislators who were previously less engaged in public discussion of vaccination, became engaged following the arrival of SARS-CoV-2, which may have implications for COVID-19 vaccine uptake among their followers.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• legislators
• politicians
• COVID-19 vaccine
• Twitter

Declaration of potential conflicts of interest

The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Acknowledgments

Support for this project, including through data acquisition, was provided by the Center for Health Economics of Treatment Interventions for Substance Use Disorder, HCV, and HIV (CHERISH), a National Institute on Drug Abuse research center (P30DA040500) and in partnership with the Research-to-Policy Collaboration, affiliated with The Pennsylvania State University’s Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2021.1911216

Additional information

Funding

Dr. Buttenheim’s time was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [7R01AI125405-04]. Dr. Meisel’s time was supported by grants from theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention [R49CE003083]; National Institute on Drug Abuse [P30DA040500]. Sponsors played no role in study design, data collection or analysis, or manuscript preparation.