The Covid pandemic has entered an advanced phase in which global vaccination is the determinant of "zero covid" attainment, making policymaking fraught with challenges. The fourth Covid wave is frustrating pandemic-exhausted authorities in the face of people who have refused vaccination, along with a resurgence of hospital admission rate, vaccination rate flatlines, and the highest seven-day incidence rate.
Worse still, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), phrased Covid as a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ at a press briefing on 16 July 2021. Since that, the dubbed ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ has taken the epicenter of COVID-19 infodemic. Still, little is known about the knock-on effects of such controversial tsunami.
In the global online news coverage experiments, we aims to unveil the scientific paradigms of the diachronic discourse. Here, the metadata analysis demonstrates the potential consequences of global online news on ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’.
Figure S1. Global discourse landscape of ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’. According to a global news coverage analysis conducted between 16 July 2021 and 30 November 2021, up to 80 countries were exposed to divisive pronouncements. The top ten countries affected by the current tsunami are the United States, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, Russia, South Korea, Canada, Austria, France, and Micronesia, respectively.
Experimental corpus：The GDELT Project
- 65+ multilingual online news coverage
- Machine translation capacity
- Network image recognition capacity
- Textual and visual narratives of different queries
According to our survey, such plausible statements are shaping global discourse, capturing the attention of English-language media outlets in more than 80 countries as of 30 November 2021.
Figure S2. Global narratives of ‘the vaccinated’ and ‘the unvaccinated’ on Twitter. According to rich metadata of the Storywrangler (T. Alshaabi, et al., Storywrangler: A massive exploratorium for sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter. Science Advances, 7(29): eabe6534, 2021.), the series reflect the normalized frequencies of narratively trending 2-grams ‘the vaccinated’ and ‘the unvaccinated’ in English tweets and retweets, before and after the dubbed ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ took the epicenter of COVID-19 infodemic. The knock-on effects demonstrate that such contentious tsunami may exacerbate dualistic antagonism and heighten the risk of disorder in western social governance.
Zhiwen Hu, Ya Chen. Open debates conducive for vaccination rate flatlines: a scoping review and convergent cross mapping. Frontiers in Public Health. 10: 830933 (2022). DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.830933