Ever since their announcement in November 2020, vaccines were largely covered, described and debated by news and social media, creating a deluge of information consumed by individuals 2, 3, 4, 5. Massive efforts were put in place by most countries to acquire and distribute millions of doses all over the world 1. Vaccination campaigns are quickly turning the table against COVID-19. Our findings expose crucial aspects of the emotional narratives around COVID-19 vaccines adopted by the press, highlighting the need to understand how alternative and mainstream media report vaccination news. rather than hopefully preventing deaths, vaccines could be reported as potential causes of death, increasing fear. Simultaneously, thrombosis and fearful conceptual associations entered the frame of vaccines, while death changed context, i.e. With the temporary suspension of “AstraZeneca”, negative associations shifted: Mainstream titles prominently linked “AstraZeneca” with side effects, while “Pfizer” underwent a positive valence shift, linked to its higher efficacy. Initially, mainstream news linked mostly “Pfizer” with side effects (e.g. News titles from alternative sources framed “AstraZeneca” with sadness, absent in mainstream titles. These emotions were crucially missing in alternative outlets. We find consistently high trust/anticipation and low disgust in the way mainstream sources framed “vaccine/vaccino”. We study Italian news articles massively re-shared on Facebook/Twitter (up to 5 million times), covering 5745 vaccine-related news from 17 news outlets over 8 months. To understand how mainstream and alternative media debated vaccines, we introduce a paradigm reconstructing time-evolving narrative frames via cognitive networks and natural language processing.
COVID-19 vaccines have been largely debated by the press.
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