  The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new opportunities for health
communication, including an increase in the public use of online outlets for
health-related emotions. People have turned to social media networks to share
sentiments related to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper we
examine the role of social messaging shared by Persons in the Public Eye (i.e.
athletes, politicians, news personnel) in determining overall public discourse
direction. We harvested approximately 13 million tweets ranging from 1 January
2020 to 1 March 2022. The sentiment was calculated for each tweet using a
fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa model, which was used to compare COVID-19
vaccine-related Twitter posts (tweets) that co-occurred with mentions of People
in the Public Eye. Our findings suggest the presence of consistent patterns of
emotional content co-occurring with messaging shared by Persons in the Public
Eye for the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced public opinion
and largely stimulated online public discourse. We demonstrate that as the
pandemic progressed, public sentiment shared on social networks was shaped by
risk perceptions, political ideologies and health-protective behaviours shared
by Persons in the Public Eye, often in a negative light.
