# Doctors vs. Nurses: Understanding the Great Divide in Vaccine Hesitancy among Healthcare Workers

**Authors:** Sajid Hussain Rafi Ahamed, Shahid Shakil, Hanjia Lyu, Xinping Zhang, Jiebo Luo  
**arXiv:** [2209.04874](https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04874)  
**Date:** 2022-09-11  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/paper/2209.04874v2/

## Key points

- Healthcare workers are important sources of vaccine-related information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- However, vaccine hesitancy remains a significant issue among healthcare workers, especially nurses.
- Researchers used social media data to compare the opinions and attitudes of doctors and nurses towards COVID-19 vaccines.
- Doctors are generally more positive towards COVID-19 vaccines than nurses.
- When discussing vaccines negatively, doctors focus on their effectiveness against newer variants while nurses pay more attention to potential side effects on children.
- Tailored communication strategies should be employed when engaging with different groups of healthcare workers regarding vaccine-related information.
- Continued efforts are needed to address vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers in order to promote widespread vaccination uptake and mitigate the impact of future pandemics.

## Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of healthcare workers as reliable sources of vaccine-related information. However, vaccine hesitancy remains a significant issue even among healthcare workers, with studies showing higher levels of hesitancy among nurses compared to doctors. To gain further insight into this phenomenon, researchers have used social media data to analyze and compare the opinions and attitudes of doctors and nurses towards COVID-19 vaccines. A keyword search was conducted on Twitter to identify healthcare workers and classify them into doctors and nurses based on their profile descriptions. Then a transformer-based language model was applied to filter out irrelevant tweets before sentiment analysis and topic modeling were performed to compare the sentiment and thematic differences in tweets posted by doctors and nurses. The findings indicate that doctors are generally more positive towards COVID-19 vaccines than nurses. Furthermore, when discussing vaccines negatively, doctors tend to focus on their effectiveness against newer variants while nurses pay more attention to potential side effects on children. These results suggest that tailored communication strategies should be employed when engaging with different groups of healthcare workers regarding vaccine-related information. This study underscores the need for continued efforts to address vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers in order to promote widespread vaccination uptake and mitigate the impact of future pandemics.