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Based on the information communicated in press releases, and finally published towards the end of 2020 by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, we have built up a simple Bayesian model, in which the main quantity of interest plays the role of…

In a world being hit by waves of COVID-19, vaccination is a light on the horizon. However, the roll-out of vaccination strategies and their influence on the pandemic are still open problems. In order to compare the effect of various…

This paper introduces PoSSUM, an open-source protocol for unobtrusive polling of social-media users via multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). PoSSUM leverages users' real-time posts, images, and other digital traces to create silicon…

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the world in an unprecedented way, causing enormous loss of life. Time and again, public health authorities have urged people to become vaccinated to protect themselves and mitigate the spread of the…

Vaccine hesitancy has been recognized as a major global health threat. Having access to any type of information in social media has been suggested as a potential powerful influence factor to hesitancy. Recent studies in other fields than…

We investigated the negative relationship between mortality and COVID-19 vaccination at ecological level, which has been established through clinical trials and other investigations at the individual level. We conducted an exploratory,…

With significant population fractions in many societies who refuse vaccines, it is important to reconsider how vaccination is incorporated into compartmental epidemiology models. It is still most common to apply the vaccination rate to the…

We present three models used to describe the recruitment of the undecided population by pro-vax and no-vax factions. Starting from real-world data of Facebook pages, we compare three opinion dynamics models that catch different behaviours…

With the present highly infectious dominant SARS-CoV-2 strain of B1.1.529 or Omicron spreading around the globe, there is concern that the COVID-19 pandemic will not end soon and that it will be a race against time until a more contagious…

In the contemporary era, social media platforms amass an extensive volume of social data contributed by their users. In order to promptly grasp the opinions and emotional inclinations of individuals regarding a product or event, it becomes…

The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated socioeconomic disparities across various racial and ethnic groups in the United States. While previous studies have utilized traditional survey methods like the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) to elucidate…

We develop a model of infection spread that takes into account the existence of a vulnerable group as well as the variability of the social relations of individuals. We develop a compartmentalized power-law model, with power-law connections…

We propose a multi-layer network model for the spread of COVID-19 that accounts for interactions within the family, between schoolmates, and casual contacts in the population. We utilize the proposed model-calibrated on epidemiological and…

The aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic saw more severe outcomes for racial minority groups and economically-deprived communities. Such disparities can be explained by several factors, including unequal access to healthcare, as well as the…

A total of 605 eligible respondents took part in this survey (population size 1630046161 and required sample size 591) with an age range of 18 to 100. A large proportion of the respondents are aged less than 50 (82%) and male (62.15%). The…

To design effective vaccine policies, policymakers need detailed data about who has been vaccinated, who is holding out, and why. However, existing data in the US are insufficient: reported vaccination rates are often delayed or missing,…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in simulating human behaviour and social intelligence. However, they risk perpetuating societal biases, especially when demographic information is involved. We introduce…

The decision of whether or not to vaccinate is a complex one. It involves the contribution both to a social good -- herd immunity -- and to one's own well being. It is informed by social influence, personal experience, education, and mass…

Although the topic of opinion polarization receives much attention from the media, public opinion researchers and political scientists, the phenomenon itself has not been adequately characterized in either the lay or academic literature. To…

Public health measures were among the most polarizing topics debated online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of the discussion surrounded specific events, such as when and which particular interventions came into practise. In this work,…