‘This year’s vaccine is only 10% effective’: a study of public discourse on vaccine effectiveness in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Background: A heated debate of vaccine effectiveness started off in Hong Kong with a famous pop singer saying that ‘This year’s vaccine is only 10% effective’ in a private message to friends. The message quickly caught the attention of the media, public and government, plunging the whole city into examining the extent to which vaccines can be effective. Despite numerous clarifications by the health professionals from the government, the public did not seem to be completely convinced by what vaccines could deliver. This raises the question of what the public discourse towards vaccine effectiveness is like in Hong Kong, especially concerning the central themes and stances involved in the public discussion.

Method: In order to examine the public discourse on vaccine effectiveness, 1001 comments on the reporting of the vaccine incident were collected from Facebook and analysed using content analysis.

Results: It is found that there were more comments expressing the anti-vaccination sentiment than the pro-vaccination one, except when the comments involved government-related statements in which all of them unanimously went against vaccination. The rest of the comments nevertheless exhibited mixed arguments under the following themes – (1) research findings (2) personal experience (3) health professionals’ image. These themes may reveal what the public deems relevant when it comes to assessing vaccine effectiveness.

Conclusions: The study adds to the existing literature on vaccine hesitancy by (1) examining some possible discourse strategies lay people use to make sense of medical information and (2) highlighting the interplay between scientific, political and ethical elements in constructing vaccine effectiveness from the eye of the public.

KEYWORDS:

• Lay perception
• vaccine hesitancy
• vaccination refusal
• risk
• attitude to health
• vaccination
• public health practice
• content analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Gigi Au Yeung for the research support. We are also indebted to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew W. L. Yeung

Dr Matthew W. L. Yeung is Lecturer at the School of Professional Education and Executive Development (SPEED), the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). His research interests lie in the areas of medical and legal communication in Hong Kong. He is particularly interested in examining lay people’s understanding of professional knowledge in medical and legal contexts.

Alice H. Y. Yau

Dr Alice H. Y. Yau is Assistant Lecturer at the Centre for the Applied English Studies at The University of Hong Kong. She is particularly interested in research that explores visual computational methods for Cantonese data analysis and individuals’ understanding of medical knowledge in healthcare settings.