Despite Brazil's tradition of successful mass immunization programs, the country has been experiencing alarming declines in vaccination coverage, especially among children. That is aggravated by the growth of anti-vaccine movements and the spread of health misinformation in social media in the last decade, which have worsened during the COVID-19 outbreak. Several reports link populism and far-right politicians to anti-vaccination support worldwide, which was also the case in Brazil during president Jair Bolsonaro's administration. This project aimed to identify the circulating pro and anti-vaccine narratives in Portuguese on Twitter, during a crucial decision-making period regarding childhood vaccination in Brazil, from December 9, 2021, until February 9, 2022. From the over one million tweets and four million retweets collected, we identified two well-defined groups, one in favor and another against vaccination. Within the sample, we selected 1500 influencer tweets with the highest impact (>500 retweets) and conducted content analysis. Although the pro-vaccine influencers were more retweeted than anti-vaxxer ones, we observed that anti-vaccine movements were more succesful in framing discussions on Twitter. The subject of COVID-19 was the target of political polarization embedded in populist, anti-science and anti-traditional media discourses promoted by anti-vaxxers. As a counterpart, the pro-vaccine influencers reacted inarticulately, focusing on criticizing the anti-vaccination actors, attitudes, and policies instead of promoting vaccines. Based on reults, we claim that a well-coordinated network of health communicators from science centers and health institutions, in partnership with properly briefed social media influencers and fact-checking sources, would more efectively pre-tempt the public about vaccine misinformation.
Keywords: Brazil; COVID-19; Social media; Twitter; Vaccine.
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