Pro-vaccines campaigns on social media. An Italian case-study

Target 

This fall, the publishing, by the Italian Minister of Health, of the alarming data showing the drop in vaccine coverage in the country, revived the ardent debate between opponents and supporters of vaccinations, especially online. Adding fuel to the fire was the death of a one-month old child by whooping cough at Sant’Orsola hospital, in Bologna, even if it is still unclear if such a tragedy actually had a significant link with the decrease of vaccine coverage or was just a coincidence.

While the echo of this death faded away, the debate persisted, with requests of making vaccines mandatory being opposed by accusations of vaccines’ perilousness and business interests raised by individuals and organizations like Codacons, a big consumers’ association that claimed to be ready to a flurry of denunciations against mass vaccinations.

Such a growing concern pushed an Italian mother to start a pro-vaccination campaign online, which soon became viral. Miriam Maurantonio asked parents to take and post a selfie with the hashtag #iovaccino (“I vaccinate” in Italian) on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and actively advertised the national vaccine call centre, sponsored by CCM (National centre for the control and prevention of infectious diseases). She also created a Facebook group that, as of today, has 12,942 subscriptions.

ASSET experts analysed the #iovaccino campaign on Twitter, to try to quantify its impact. The initiative started to become visible on October 13th, with more than 200 tweets, rising to 460 four days later. in general, between October 17th and 23rd, vaccines were discussed in the 0.04% of the total tweets in Italy (700,000 daily), with a daily average of 2,400 tweets. Within this discussion, the #iovaccino hashtag had an impact quantifiable between 4 and 16%, with a daily average of 193.6 tweets.

Fig. 1 – Number of daily tweets.

ASSET experts analysis further explored the period between October 17th and 23rd: 8,593 people participated to the online discussion on vaccines, 1,267 of whom cited #iovaccino. Such an involvement was favoured by the participation of some highly followed accounts, including UNICEF Italia (230,035 followers) and CICAP (an Italian organization aimed to counter misinformation and pseudoscience, with 70,543 followers), both in favour of vaccines.

Sentiment analysis of #iovaccino tweets revealed a predominant positive trend (fig. 2), which took several forms: generic support, photos, recommendation of related sources, highlighting and critic of opposing claims – with a particular negative emphasis on Codacon’s position. Only 27 users of the #iovaccino hashtag expressed negative opinions. They tweeted more than those favourable to the campaign (3.14 versus 1.7 tweet per user) but had less followers (an average of 459 versus 4401). Some of their tweets mocked vaccines supporters for their alleged ingenuity, others cited different sources – including a paper published on Human & Experimental Toxicology – to counter their arguments.

Fig. 2 –Sentiment analysis of #iovaccino tweets.

The tweets with a neutral sentiment were 224, posted by 187 users. It is interesting to note, among them, the official account of one of the Italian public television channel, RaiDue, which restricted itself to report the existence of the controversy on the web, without taking any side.

Both the general discussion on vaccines and the visibility of the #iovaccino campaign quickly declined as time went by, falling to about 300 total tweets and few tens with the #iovaccino hashtag (fig. 1).

One of the direct consequences of Maurantonio’s campaign that ASSET expert’s analysis revealed is the support to the petition promoted on Change.org by another mother, Alice Pignatti, who asked the Italian minister of health, Beatrice Lorenzin, to pass a law that would make vaccines obligatory to access public school. In fact, the link to the petition was the most cited among those with the #iovaccino hashtag and a positive sentiment toward the campaign.

MMLAP and other EU Projects

Health system analysis to support capacity development in response to the threat of pandemic influenza in Asia
Making society an active participant in water adaptation to global change
Public Participation in Developing a Common Framework for Assessment and Management of Sustainable Innovation
Engaging all of Europe in shaping a desirable and sustainable future
Expect the unexpected and know how to respond
Driving innovation in crisis management for European resilience
Effective communication in outbreak management: development of an evidence-based tool for Europe
Solutions to improve CBRNe resilience
Network for Communicable Disease Control in Southern Europe and Mediterranean Countries
Developing the framework for an epidemic forecast infrastructure
Strengthening of the national surveillance system for communicable diseases
Surveillance of vaccine preventable hepatitis
European monitoring of excess mortality for public health action
European network for highly infectious disease
Dedicated surveillance network for surveillance and control of vaccine preventable diseases in the EU
Modelling the spread of pandemic influenza and strategies for its containment and mitigation
Cost-effectiveness assessment of european influenza human pandemic alert and response strategies
Bridging the gap between science, stakeholders and policy makers
Promotion of immunization for health professionals in Europe
Towards inclusive research programming for sustainable food innovations
Addressing chronic diseases and healthy ageing across the life cycle
Medical ecosystem – personalized event-based surveillance
Studying the many and varied economic, social, legal and ethical aspects of the recent developments on the Internet, and their consequences for the individual and society at large
Get involved in the responsible marine research and innovation
Knowledge-based policy-making on issues involving science, technology and innovation, mainly based upon the practices in Parliamentary Technology Assessment
Assessment of the current pandemic preparedness and response tools, systems and practice at national, EU and global level in priority areas
Analysis of innovative public engagement tools and instruments for dynamic governance in the field of Science in Society
Public Engagement with Research And Research Engagement with Society
Computing Veracity – the Fourth Challenge of Big Data
Providing infrastructure, co-ordination and integration of existing clinical research networks on epidemics and pandemics
Promote vaccinations among migrant population in Europe
Creating mechanisms for effectively tackling the scientific and technology related challenges faced by society
Improve the quality of indoor air, keeping it free from radon
Improving respect of ethics principles and laws in research and innovation, in line with the evolution of technologies and societal concerns
Investigating how cities in the West securitise against global pandemics
Creating a structured dialogue and mutual learning with citizens and urban actors by setting up National Networks in 10 countries across Europe
Identifying how children can be change agents in the Science and Society relationship
Establishing an open dialogue between stakeholders concerning synthetic biology’s potential benefits and risks
Transparent communication in Epidemics: Learning Lessons from experience, delivering effective Messages, providing Evidence