Does the COVID-19 Vaccine Still Work That "Most of the Confirmed Cases Had Been Vaccinated"? A Content Analysis of Vaccine Effectiveness Discussion on Sina Weibo during the Outbreak of COVID-19 in Nanjing.

In July 2021, breakthrough cases were reported in the outbreak of COVID-19 in Nanjing, sparking concern and discussion about the vaccine's effectiveness and becoming a trending topic on Sina Weibo. In order to explore public attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine and their emotional orientations, we collected 1542 posts under the trending topic through data mining. We set up four categories of attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines, and used a big data analysis tool to code and manually checked the coding results to complete the content analysis. The results showed that 45.14% of the Weibo posts (n = 1542) supported the COVID-19 vaccine, 12.97% were neutral, and 7.26% were doubtful, which indicated that the public did not question the vaccine's effectiveness due to the breakthrough cases in Nanjing. There were 66.47% posts that reflected significant negative emotions. Among these, 50.44% of posts with negative emotions were directed towards the media, 25.07% towards the posting users, and 11.51% towards the public, which indicated that the negative emotions were not directed towards the COVID-19 vaccine. External sources outside the vaccine might cause vaccine hesitancy. Public opinions expressed in online media reflect the public's cognition and attitude towards vaccines and their core needs in terms of information. Therefore, online public opinion monitoring could be an essential way to understand the opinions and attitudes towards public health issues.

Changes of the Public Attitudes of China to Domestic COVID-19 Vaccination After the Vaccines Were Approved: A Semantic Network and Sentiment Analysis Based on Sina Weibo Texts.

Introduction: On December 31, 2020, the Chinese government announced that the domestic coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) vaccines have obtained approval for conditional marketing and are free for vaccination. This release drove the attention of the public and intense debates on social media, which reflected public attitudes to the domestic vaccine. This study examines whether the public concerns and public attitudes to domestic COVID-19 vaccines changed after the official announcement. Methods: This article used big data analytics in the research, including semantic network and sentiment analysis. The purpose of the semantic network is to obtain the public concerns about domestic vaccines. Sentiment analysis reflects the sentiments of the public to the domestic vaccines and the emotional changes by comparing the specific sentiments shown on the posts before and after the official announcement. Results: There exists a correlation between the public concerns about domestic vaccines before and after the official announcement. According to the semantic network analysis, the public concerns about vaccines have changed after the official announcement. The public focused on the performance issues of the vaccines before the official approval, but they cared more about the practical issues of vaccination after that. The sentiment analysis showed that both positive and negative emotions increased among the public after the official announcement. "Good" was the most increased positive emotion and indicated great public appreciation for the production capacity and free vaccination. "Fear" was the significantly increased negative emotion and reflected the public concern about the safety of the vaccines. Conclusion: The official announcement of the approval for marketing improved the Chinese public acceptance of the domestic COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, safety and effectiveness are vital factors influencing public vaccine hesitancy.

ORF8 contributes to cytokine storm during SARS-CoV-2 infection by activating IL-17 pathway.

Recently, COVID-19 caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has brought great challenges to the world. More and more studies have shown that patients with severe COVID-19 may suffer from cytokine storm syndrome; however, there are few studies on its pathogenesis. Here we demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 coding protein open reading frame 8 (ORF8) acted as a contributing factor to cytokine storm during COVID-19 infection. ORF8 could activate IL-17 signaling pathway and promote the expression of pro-inflammatory factors. Moreover, we demonstrated that treatment of IL17RA antibody protected mice from ORF8-induced inflammation. Our findings are helpful to understand the pathogenesis of cytokine storm caused by SARS-CoV-2 and provide a potential target for the development of COVID-19 therapeutic drugs.