COVID-19 Vaccine Perception in South Korea: Web Crawling Approach

Background The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization emphasized vaccination against COVID-19 because physical distancing proved inadequate to mitigate death, illness, and massive economic loss. Objective This study aimed to investigate Korean citizens’ perceptions of vaccines by examining their views on COVID-19 vaccines, their positive and negative perceptions of each vaccine, and ways to enhance policies to increase vaccine acceptance. Methods This cross-sectional study analyzed posts on NAVER and Instagram to examine Korean citizens’ perception of COVID-19 vaccines. The keywords searched were “vaccine,” “AstraZeneca,” and “Pfizer.” In total 8100 posts in NAVER and 5291 posts in Instagram were sampled through web crawling. Morphology analysis was performed, overlapping or meaningless words were removed, sentiment analysis was implemented, and 3 public health professionals reviewed the results. Results The findings revealed a negative perception of COVID-19 vaccines; of the words crawled, the proportion of negative words for AstraZeneca was 71.0% (476/670) and for Pfizer was 56.3% (498/885). Among words crawled with “vaccine,” “good” ranked first, with a frequency of 13.43% (312/2323). Meanwhile, “side effect” ranked highest, with a frequency of 29.2% (163/559) for “AstraZeneca,” but 0.6% (4/673) for “Pfizer.” With “vaccine,” positive words were more frequently used, whereas with “AstraZeneca” and “Pfizer” negative words were prevalent. Conclusions There is a negative perception of AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines in Korea, with 1 in 4 people refusing vaccination. To address this, accurate information needs to be shared about vaccines including AstraZeneca, and the experiences of those vaccinated. Furthermore, government communication about risk management is required to increase the AstraZeneca vaccination rate for herd immunity before the vaccine expires.