The Effect of Fear of Infection and Sufficient Vaccine Reservation Information on Rapid COVID-19 Vaccination in Japan: Evidence From a Retrospective Twitter Analysis

BACKGROUND: The global public health and socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been substantial, rendering herd immunity by COVID-19 vaccination an important factor for protecting people and retrieving the economy. Among all the countries, Japan became one of the countries with the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates in several months, although vaccine confidence in Japan is the lowest worldwide. OBJECTIVE: We attempted to find the reasons for rapid COVID-19 vaccination in Japan given its lowest vaccine confidence levels worldwide, through Twitter analysis. METHODS: We downloaded COVID-19–related Japanese tweets from a large-scale public COVID-19 Twitter chatter data set within the timeline of February 1 and September 30, 2021. The daily number of vaccination cases was collected from the official website of the Prime Minister’s Office of Japan. After preprocessing, we applied unigram and bigram token analysis and then calculated the cross-correlation and Pearson correlation coefficient (r) between the term frequency and daily vaccination cases. We then identified vaccine sentiments and emotions of tweets and used the topic modeling to look deeper into the dominant emotions. RESULTS: We selected 190,697 vaccine-related tweets after filtering. Through n-gram token analysis, we discovered the top unigrams and bigrams over the whole period. In all the combinations of the top 6 unigrams, tweets with both keywords “reserve” and “venue” showed the largest correlation with daily vaccination cases (r=0.912; P<.001). On sentiment analysis, negative sentiment overwhelmed positive sentiment, and fear was the dominant emotion across the period. For the latent Dirichlet allocation model on tweets with fear emotion, the two topics were identified as “infect” and “vaccine confidence.” The expectation of the number of tweets generated from topic “infect” was larger than that generated from topic “vaccine confidence.” CONCLUSIONS: Our work indicates that awareness of the danger of COVID-19 might increase the willingness to get vaccinated. With a sufficient vaccine supply, effective delivery of vaccine reservation information may be an important factor for people to get vaccinated. We did not find evidence for increased vaccine confidence in Japan during the period of our study. We recommend policy makers to share accurate and prompt information about the infectious diseases and vaccination and to make efforts on smoother delivery of vaccine reservation information.