Vaccine Search Patterns Provide Insights into Vaccination Intent
Sean Malahy, Mimi Sun, Keith Spangler, Jessica Leibler, Kevin Lane,, Shailesh Bavadekar, Chaitanya Kamath, Akim Kumok, Yuantong Sun, Jai Gupta,, Tague Griffith, Adam Boulanger, Mark Young, Charlotte Stanton, Yael Mayer,, Karen Smith, Tomer Shekel, Katherine Chou, Greg Corrado

TL;DR
This study demonstrates that Google search trends related to COVID-19 vaccines can serve as early indicators of vaccination interest and future vaccination rates, aiding public health strategies.
Contribution
It introduces a method to use internet search data as a real-time marker for vaccination intent, enhancing public health response capabilities.
Findings
Google's Vaccine Search Insights index correlates with future vaccination rates.
Search interest in vaccines predicts vaccination uptake up to three weeks later.
Early search trends strongly correlate with long-term vaccination rates (up to r=0.89).
Abstract
Despite ample supply of COVID-19 vaccines, the proportion of fully vaccinated individuals remains suboptimal across much of the US. Rapid vaccination of additional people will prevent new infections among both the unvaccinated and the vaccinated, thus saving lives. With the rapid rollout of vaccination efforts this year, the internet has become a dominant source of information about COVID-19 vaccines, their safety and efficacy, and their availability. We sought to evaluate whether trends in internet searches related to COVID-19 vaccination - as reflected by Google's Vaccine Search Insights (VSI) index - could be used as a marker of population-level interest in receiving a vaccination. We found that between January and August of 2021: 1) Google's weekly VSI index was associated with the number of new vaccinations administered in the subsequent three weeks, and 2) the average VSI index in…
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Taxonomy
TopicsVaccine Coverage and Hesitancy · Influenza Virus Research Studies · vaccines and immunoinformatics approaches
