The Conversation It has long been recognised that attitudes towards vaccines may be vaccine-specific, so that people may take up some, but not others.
On July 26 2021, the following statement was posted on Twitter (later renamed X) about the COVID-19 vaccine:
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.
My colleagues and I came across this comment and many like it while analysing a nine-million-word dataset consisting of tweets about the COVID and MMR vaccines posted between 2008 and 2022, to learn more about vaccine scepticism. We discovered that the author of this tweet is not alone in questioning the status of the COVID-19 vaccines as vaccines, and comparing it to others.