What and who is driving the COVID-19 vaccine development conversation?

GPG’s Analytics and Data Science team’s recent analysis shows not only is this conversation expanding, but the most influential voices on the topic may not be who you think they are.

Louder, more shock-value, and ‘celebrity’ voices such as Ben Shapiro or Justin Bieber, despite having an exceptionally high reach, are often not influential within the vaccine development conversation.

This means that despite having many followers, they aren’t driving other influential voices to engage, sharing relevant information or connecting other users within the conversation–meaning they are often overvalued.

On the other hand, some of the niche medical accounts with a smaller reach such as CEPI Vaccines score high on influence in line with some of the more obvious topic influencers such as Barack Obama.

This means that they are largely overlooked because of their smaller followings despite being key drivers of relevant information and network connections.

GPG’s proprietary Network Influencer Tool determines the degree of topic influence from five quantitative variables based on network analysis. This helped us identify two subsets of influencers that reveal who is undervalued and who is overvalued in the vaccine development conversation.

For additional insights, the full paper can be found here.