Complex Network and Topological Data Analysis Methods for County Level COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance Analysis in the...

The benefits of vaccination to protect against the different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus are well-known in the literature. In the United States, public health policy has led to a wide availability of COVID-19 vaccines that are usually freely available to everyone 6 months and older. However, several factors including misinformation create vaccine hesitancy and threaten to undercut the advances of the COVID-19 vaccination program. In this article, we take a network-based approach to investigate community acceptance of vaccines at the county level in the United States, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We use an exponential random graph model to discover important sociodemographic factors that influence the patterns of vaccination between counties and communities. In addition, we undertake an advanced topological data analysis (TDA) based network clustering method to discover more macrolevel communities that show common trends for COVID-19 vaccine acceptance in the United States. Our study uncovers that sociodemographic features, for example, higher education, household income, and US census regions have significant effects on COVID-19 vaccine acceptance. The cluster analysis demonstrates that different census regions as well as rural and urban areas have distinct preferences in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance.