“It’s not even a real vaccine. You can catch Covid and also spread it if you are vaccinated. You don’t catch polio or MMR after you are vaccinated.”

This kind of comment found on Twitter/X is one example of a trend for ‘vaccine scepticism’ on social media, revealed by collaborative research led by Lancaster. The findings are important in terms of shaping future public health communications and planning around vaccinations.

“This study was made possible by a collaboration between linguists at Lancaster and colleagues with complementary expertise at University College London and Georgetown University in Washington DC,” explained Professor Elena Semino in Lancaster’s Linguistics Department. “The involvement of the UK Security Agency was also crucial in making sure that the study addressed relevant questions with regard to vaccine hesitancy and how it can be addressed.”

The research — drawing on a nine-million-word body of words or ‘corpus’, consisting of tweets containing references to the MMR vaccine posted between 2008 and 2022 — found that scepticism about the status of any vaccine being a real vaccine was very rarely expressed on Twitter before 2020.

“The finding that some people on Twitter/X question the status of the COVID-19 vaccines as vaccines was unexpected,” said Elena, “and shows the importance of explaining how different vaccines work, depending on the nature of the disease, how they modify disease rather than prevent infection for example.”

Read more on the Lancaster University website.