Skip to content
Syntasa

Customer story · National Government

A global vaccine confidence platform, working in six weeks.

With the World Health Organization, the UK Cabinet Office used Syntasa on Google Cloud to build the Global Vaccine Confidence Platform, showing real-time sentiment toward vaccines across more than 110 countries.

Talk with our teamDownload the case study

Results

Vaccine sentiment, for more than 110 countries.

  • Time to MVP6 weeksfrom start to a working platform
  • Coverage110+countries with real-time vaccine sentiment
  • Data sources7public, research and social data sets in one platform

Context

Vaccine confidence, as a G7 priority.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization named vaccine hesitancy, the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite available vaccines, as one of the top ten threats to global health.

The UK Cabinet Office, which supports the Prime Minister and Cabinet and coordinates the delivery of government objectives, worked with the WHO to build vaccine confidence and address misinformation as a key deliverable of the UK's G7 presidency.

It engaged Syntasa to build a Global Vaccine Confidence Platform on Google Cloud, so stakeholders around the world could understand vaccine hesitancy and collaborate more effectively.

The constraint

Insight that couldn't cross borders fast enough.

  1. Insight locked awayGovernments and the public and private sector held useful data on hesitancy and misinformation, but others often didn't know it existed or couldn't reach it.
  2. Lessons too slow to travelSuccessful vaccine-confidence campaigns in one country reached others too slowly to make an impact when it mattered most.
  3. Narratives that keep movingMisinformation drives hesitancy, and willingness to vaccinate shifts over time and place, so a one-off view goes stale fast.
  4. Data under the customer's controlThe software and all data had to sit in a private cloud environment owned and governed by the customer.

Deployment

From scattered data to a shared global view.

Syntasa built the platform with the Cabinet Office, delivering a minimum viable product in six weeks.

  1. Step 1: Bring the sources together

    Google COVID-19 Open Data, Google Health Trends, Carnegie Mellon's CovidCast, the COVID-19 World Symptom survey, Signal AI, Twitter and Brandwatch, structured and unstructured, in one platform.

  2. Step 2: Find the narratives

    Bigtable, BigQuery and Google Cloud's Natural Language API measure the direction and strength of sentiment, and topic modeling finds the themes emerging in conversations worldwide.

  3. Step 3: Put it in front of communicators

    Looker dashboards show undecided populations by country, with country views by age, gender, ethnicity and more, and how narratives relate to vaccination rates.

Outcome

What changed for the mission.

  • Working in six weeks

    A minimum viable product of the platform was delivered in six weeks, at the speed the pandemic demanded.

  • Sentiment across 110+ countries

    Stakeholders see real-time attitudes toward vaccines, their risks, safety, effectiveness and importance, and how those views change over time.

  • One infrastructure for many partners

    Governments, donors, the WHO, the World Bank, UNICEF, NGOs and private organizations can use the same insight to prioritize support.

  • Designed for national instances

    The full platform adds separate national instances, so local stakeholders can share proprietary data securely for local initiatives.

“Our vision is to build the digital infrastructure, with the World Health Organisation, to enable the collaboration of international, national and local partners, including in vulnerable countries to promote vaccine confidence.”

Gerald Mullally, Director, Government Communication Service International

FAQ

Questions teams ask first.

Resources

Go behind the scenes.

Case study · PDF · 4 pages

Read the full UK Cabinet Office story.

The full story, with the architecture, how it works, a timeline and the detailed results.

Download the case study

Related.

Your constraint won't be our first.

Tell us what you are working under. We will bring the closest story and the engineers who delivered it.

Talk with our teamDownload the case studyA working session with our engineers, on your data and constraints.