Negative COVID-19 Vaccine Information on Twitter: Content Analysis.

Background: Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, have a role in spreading anti-vaccine opinion and misinformation. Vaccines have been an important component of managing the COVID-19 pandemic, so content that discourages vaccination is generally seen as a concern to public health. However, not all negative information about vaccines is explicitly anti-vaccine, and some of it may be an important part of open communication between public health experts and the community.

Estimated reproduction ratios in the SIR model.

The aim of this article is to understand the extreme variability in estimates of the reproduction ratio observed in practice. For expository purposes, we consider a discrete-time, stochastic version of the susceptible-infected-recovered model and introduce different approximate maximum likelihood estimators of . We carefully discuss the properties of these estimators and illustrate, by a Monte Carlo study, the widths of confidence intervals for .