Suffering from Vaccines or from Government? : Partisan Bias in COVID-19 Vaccine Adverse Events Coverage

TL;DR

This study reveals partisan bias in COVID-19 vaccine adverse events coverage, showing conservative media report more adverse events without reflecting real severity, influenced by political polarization and user comments.

Contribution

It introduces a language model-based analysis of partisan bias in vaccine adverse event coverage using large-scale news and comment data.

Findings

Conservative media report more adverse events than liberal media.

Coverage is not correlated with actual adverse event severity.

Partisan support influences user comment popularity.

Abstract

Vaccine adverse events have been presumed to be a relatively objective measure that is immune to political polarization. The real-world data, however, shows the correlation between presidential disapproval ratings and the subjective severity of adverse events. This paper investigates the partisan bias in COVID vaccine adverse events coverage with language models that can classify the topic of vaccine-related articles and the political disposition of news comments. Based on 90K news articles from 52 major newspaper companies, we found that conservative media are inclined to report adverse events more frequently than their liberal counterparts, while the coverage itself was statistically uncorrelated with the severity of real-world adverse events. The users who support the conservative opposing party were more likely to write the popular comments from 2.3K random sampled articles on news platforms. This research implies that bipartisanship can still play a significant role in forming public opinion on the COVID vaccine even after the majority of the population's vaccination