An Analysis of the Early Dialogue on Vaccine Passports on Twitter

This paper analyzes the early dialogue on vaccine pass-ports that played on Twitter. Tweets collected in March 2021 soon after the news outlets first reported about vaccine passports were labeled according to whether they supported or opposed the concept. These labeled tweets were analyzed in three ways. A thematic analysis, based on building word clouds, was conducted to understand why people support or oppose vaccine passports. This analysis suggests that support for vaccine passports draws upon the past precedent in that vaccination proofs confer health benefits and have been used for a long time for both travel and school enrollment. On the other hand, the opposition mainly stems from resistance to government interference and control, and secondarily from the protection of medical privacy. Social parameters are analyzed to understand the degree of engagement and ultimately gain insights into the strength of the opposition and support. This exploration indicates that the opposition is significantly stronger than support, as indicated by the sheer volume of tweets, likes and retweets, which are a proxy for the degree of engagement. Finally, a classification framework is built by using various types of features extracted from the labeled, pre-processed tweets to train popular machine learning models. The framework can separate tweets into pro-passport and anti-passport groups with a Fl-score of about 0.80. Our results indicate that the support for vaccine passports is relatively weak compared to the strength of the opposition. This does not bode well for the implementation and acceptance of this idea, and these passports may in fact deepen vaccine hesitancy rather than alleviate it.