Background: The development of social media has overturned traditional medical communication channels, with more and more people using social media to acquire health-related knowledge and participate in related discussions. To better understand how social media influences people’s attitudes toward the HPV vaccine uptake, this paper queried relevant microblog data from Weibo API within the recent year, aiming to explore the public sentiment about the HPV vaccine uptake in China.

Methods: Data collection was performed by using API-based crawler technology, with keywords and hashtags posts including but not limited to #HPV#, #Cervical Cancer (translated)#, and #Nine-valent (translated)#. A total of 229,150 effective original posts from 01/07/2021 to 31/06/2022 have been collected, where their metadata involve includes id, original post contents, time of sending, IP location, number of reposts, number of comments, and number of attitudes (thumbs-up). Then we constructed the sentiment analysis model to measure people’s attitudes toward HPV vaccine uptake. Further, based on IP location, sentiment data are separated to go through a geospatial process to construct a comparative study, and further help understand the regional disparities.

Result: The majority of the Chinese population expressed positive attitudes toward the HPV vaccines, where positive accounts for around 76% of all effective posts. Further, the geospatial analysis failed to prove disparities in attitudes across different regions in China. Moreover, there is not a significant correlation between the extent of economic development and public positive sentiment toward the HPV vaccine uptake in China.

Conclusion: In general, Chinese people’s sentiments toward the HPV vaccine tended to be positive, but 24% of the negative posts also revealed a long way for the policymakers to spread correct and accurate vaccine knowledge among the population.