Identification of COVID-19 VaccinesConcerns in Health-Related French Web Forums : A Topic Modelling Approach

Abstract

Since December 2019 and the first reported cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, there have been 199,466,211 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the World. The WHO defined vaccination hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to global health in 2019. Our objective was thus to identify topics and trends about COVID-19 vaccines from French web forums to understand the perception of the French population on these vaccines before the vaccination campaign started. We performed a topic model analysis on 485 web forums' posts. 10 topics were found. We reviewed 120 posts from 6 of these 10 topics. One topic was about vaccine hesitancy, refusal, and mistrust, and two topics were related to what the users think about the government, the political and economic choices made towards this epidemic.