Robyn Correll, MPH, CHWI

For those transitioning from traditional machine learning to LLMs, it is crucial to understand how choices in data collection and training-including keyword selection, fine-tuning data quantity, stopping conditions, collapsing categories, and labeling conflicts-can significantly impact model performance, especially with smaller datasets.

To examine the effects of keyword selection and training data size might impact model performance, two separate Twitter datasets relating to sentiments regarding COVID-19 vaccination — one using a more specific set of keywords and another using more generalized keywords — were used to train two BERT models with increasing quantities of hand-labeled data.

Educational pamphlet about vaccines during pregnancy, created in collaboration with Día de la Mujer Latina for Promotores de Salud.

To examine the magnitude of vaccine misinformation in traditional media (Professionally Generated Content, not User Generated Content), we used Cision’s NextGen Communications Cloud platform12 for the period 27 July 2020 (the day that phase 3 trials for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines began) through 30 June 2021.

After spending a decade working in public health, the question of vaccinations is an important one to me. I’ve worked with families who lost their kids to vaccine-preventable diseases like pertussis, also known as whooping cough. I grieved for them — how could you not? If I wasn’t going to play around with baby carriers, I surely wasn’t going to roll the dice on something like that.

After analyzing data collected from hundreds of immunization stakeholders at town hall meetings and surveys, scouring peer-reviewed journals, and crunching data sets, this report outlines the most important challenges and opportunities in vaccine-preventing and emerging diseases threatening Texas today.

Latasha Haynes was 34 when she almost died of the flu last year. What started as a little coughing and fatigue ended with two blood transfusions and a diagnosis of congestive heart failure weeks later. Flu had caused damage to her heart muscles and the saclike tissue around it. She survived, but just barely, and it took her months to recover.

I knew my son was sick when he didn’t want the iPad. Normally, my energetic toddler would have been begging to get his sticky fingers on the screen, but when I set it down next to him, he didn’t even reach for it.

This publication is the culmination of more than six months of research – gathering input and feedback from hundreds of immunization stakeholders at town hall meetings and via a survey on the challenges and opportunities they experience as they work to protect Texas communities from vaccine-preventable diseases. The feedback collected, as well as information gathered from state and national government agencies and peer-reviewed papers, is presented in this report as a means to shed light on the state of immunizations in Texas, as well as serve as a road map for all immunization stakeholders – healthcare providers, public health personnel, and legislators alike – on what can be done to protect and improve immunization rates in Texas communities.