Vaccine Safety Media and Blog Analysis

Background:
Blogs have become a key source of information for parents who have questions regarding their concerns about vaccinations. For this reason, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases set out to investigate what is being said about vaccinations in both blogs and traditional news and how the questions and concerns are being phrased and by whom.

Objectives:
Identify dominant message themes and estimated readership for both news and Blog articles about vacine safety

Methods:
Auto-INFORM, an automated media monitoring system that reads, analyzes, and codes articles, was used to scan and discover a list of themes describing what was being said, both in traditional news mediums and on internet blogs, about vaccines and their safety - including individual messages, questions, issues and concerns. Semantic queries were built from these themes to search the entire Auto-INFORM repository consisting of data from 1,387 of sources from January to August 2008.

Results:
From the time period May 2008 through August 2008, over one million (1,037,815) news and blog stories were analyzed and 10,653 of them were found related to vaccine safety issues. Of these, traditional news sources produced 4,071 articles and blogs contained 6,582 articles. Auto-INFORM investigation revealed the following recurring themes:The theme list consisted of 17 categories and 52 messages about vaccinations. Standard reports were run for both traditional news media and blogs with the detailed theme list to capture specific articles concerning vaccine safety issues from the months of May to August 2008

Conclusions:
There were more negative comments and statements suggesting the link between vaccinations (and thimerosal in particular) and autism than there were in the traditional news sources. Due to the negative information regarding the link between vaccinations and autism within blogs, parents may decide to discontinue vaccinations or refuse to vaccinate their children at all.