Vaccine hesitancy is not new - back in the 1950s nearly a third of Americans were skeptical of the polio vaccine as well as the flu shot and the smallpox vaccine. In 1955, a vaccine manufacturing defect at the Cutter Laboratories led to several children being paralyzed by the early polio vaccine. Vaccines resumed after tighter regulations were put in place. New this time around, in 2021, with the United States possessing a surplus of vaccines, are the political divisions around the lifesaving shot, and…the Internet 2.0. Even as I write this piece a prominent rightwing radio talkshow host has died of Covid. Apparently, his last days included a plea to his friends and family to get vaccinated.
Usually, I like to write reflective pieces with a historical flavor and without plot tension, a pleasurable meandering through old forgotten texts, revisiting personalities, events, and phenomena lingering - just barely - in our memory. Today, I am writing about anti-vaxxers, the Internet, and solutions. As an educator and consultant I feel compelled to address the vaccine ignorance, no, vaccine hostility that is leaving lesions not just physically on our people’s bodies but on the American body politic itself. I believe the past can be harnessed to solve a pressing contemporary problem. The desperate last-standism of anti-vaxxers is an interesting sociological puzzle but a historical lesson too.
Photo Credit: S. Hermann and F. Richter, Pixabay
We should have seen this problem coming. The anti-vaccination movement has its roots in the fake news surge which in turn is tied to the emergence of the Internet 2.0 when user-generated content began to drive online discourse. About 15 years ago, in an episode of the first season of “House” (2004-05), Dr. Lisa Cuddy, the Dean of Medicine at the teaching hospital, remarks ruefully “Everyone’s a doctor,” when a child’s father insists forcefully he researched his kid’s ailment on the Internet. Way before Covid-19 appeared in Wuhan, pop culture had cottoned on to the tendency of people to become Internet certified doctors. But, this might be dismissed as innocent misinterpretation. The problem however is that anti-vaccination is now about active disinformation. Physicians and researchers have been warning us for several years now about growing anti-vaccine discourse on the Internet. “The fear about vaccines fueled by an anti-vaccination movement, using Internet and other media,” wrote Dr. Marian Olpinski in 2012, “causes more and more parents to refuse to immunize their children.”1 In 2012 again, public health researcher Anna Kata broke down in a granular fashion the growing influence of the Internet’s user-generated content in shaping anti-vaccine mindsets. Anti-vaxxers try to go around accepted medical knowledge by positioning their acquired online knowledge as “natural”, “patient empowerment” and a crusade against Big Pharma, among many other justifications for their stance. The internet also becomes the vehicle through which such anti-vaccine beliefs circulate and reach more people.2
Experts are right that anti-vaccine disinformation cannot be countered solely by pushing out “good information” or accurate science. The reason why disinformation is so stubbornly resistant online is because people are making money off it. A large part of the anti-vaccine movement is not about misguided belief, it is about profiting off vaccine hesitancy.
How to counter this? My advice: build another business model to boost accurate information. This would involve not only science but also sociology, history and some good old fashioned community work to nudge people towards better health decisions. This needs a studio approach, people working in teams, coming up with boutique solutions for each region. Will it work? I don’t know but designing learning modules sure beats sitting around lamenting. For here we are, in August 2021, looking once again into the abyss. It is not the old chasm from early 2020 when all of us peered into the unknown horrors together. This time the bottomless pit separates two peoples - the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The fully vaccinated still travel and mingle, albeit cautiously and mostly with each other. The unvaccinated have the daring of desperation, partying defiantly, or the evasive face-saving furtiveness of the secretly vaxxed.
Weaning people off the anti-vaccine drug will allow all of us to return to (even partially) better times like the early summer of 2021. The upper Midwest looked cautiously optimistic. Sunshine brought out lots of people. Vaccinated or not, people flocked to restaurants, bars, parks, ball games. Many folks, including yours truly, traveled and attended graduation parties (with fully vaccinated people).
Spoon and Cherry Park, Minneapolis. Picture by The Moving Finger
I would like us to get back to this state of affairs as a base for rebuilding. I am working on actionable plans that will - hopefully - increase public health awareness which saves lives which means more paying customers for businesses that want their customers to stay alive to pay the bills. Advocating a mix of sociological and psychological approaches, I also ask educators to be aware of history for maximum effectiveness. So, if you are in the public health sector or an adjacent field email me and let’s see if we can turn this ship of disease around and away from our shores. Let’s get to work!
Marian Olpinski, “Anti-Vaccination Movement and Parental Refusals of Immunization of Children in USA,” Pediatra Polska 87 (2012): 384.
Anna Kata. "Anti-vaccine Activists, Web 2.0, and the Postmodern Paradigm – An Overview of Tactics and Tropes Used Online by the Anti-vaccination Movement." Vaccine 30 (2012): 3778-3789.