Understanding how existing anti-vaccination sources addressed COVID-19 vaccines: A content analysis of archived websites (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and concurrent development of vaccines offered the rare opportunity to study anti-vaccination behavior as it formed. OBJECTIVE Assess how anti-vaccination website content addressed COVID-19 vaccines METHODS Using a collection of 25 anti-vaccination websites curated by the IvyPlus Web Collection Program prior to the pandemic and crawled every 6 months via Archive-IT, we conducted a content analysis to see how these websites acknowledged or ignored COVID-19 vaccines. Websites were assessed for financial behaviors, mention of COVID vaccines, references to personal freedom, safety concerns, and skepticism of science. RESULTS The majority of websites addressed COVID-19 vaccines in a negative fashion, with more websites making appeals to personal freedom or expressing skepticism of science than questioning safety. Many of the anti-vaccination websites we evaluated actively sought donations and members. The content analysis also offered the opportunity to test the viability of archived websites for use in scholarly research. The archived versions of the websites had significant shortcomings and required supplementation with the live websites. CONCLUSIONS In summary, we found anti-vaccination websites existing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic largely adapted their messaging to address COVID-19 vaccines. Our study also demonstrated the timely and significant need for more robust web archiving capabilities.