Renée DiResta, in The Atlantic, on the scourge of vaccine conspiracy theories and how social media makes it easy for them to spread:
The misleading claims Americans will soon hear about the newly released COVID-19 vaccines are nearly identical to claims made about smallpox immunizations 120 years ago: The ingredients are toxic and unnatural; the vaccines are insufficiently tested; the scientists who produce them are quacks and profiteers; the cell cultures involved in some shots are an affront to the religious; the authorities working to protect public health are guilty of tyrannical overreach. In the British Medical Journal in that period, a Dr. Francis T. Bond frets about what to do about his era’s anti-vaxxers and their arguments, which have since become well-trod canards because they are effective in frightening people.
Today’s anti-vaccine activists, however, enjoy a speed, scale, and reach far greater than those of Dr. Bond’s day. Bottom-up networked activism is driving the spread of anti-vaccine COVID-19 propaganda. Americans are about to see a deluge of tweets, posts, and snarky memes that will attempt to erode trust in the vaccine rollouts. Society’s ability to return to a semblance of normalcy depends on how effectively public-health authorities counter this misinformation and how assiduously media outlets and internet platforms refrain from amplifying it—but also on whether average Americans recognize that the material they click on and share has real-world consequences.
The deliberate campaign against the vaccine has already begun. Within 48 hours of the first people in the U.S. receiving the Pfizer vaccine, anti-vaccine activists were amplifying stories of allergic reactions and sharing claims about friends of friends whom the vaccine had supposedly injured or killed.
Public-opinion polling indicates that tens of millions of Americans are what physicians call “vaccine hesitant,” and stories of people who experience harsh side effects from the injection, or die for entirely unrelated reasons after receiving it, will inevitably find an audience. But many vaccine horror stories will originate in the well-established echo chambers of anti-vaccine true believers, including many of the same people who actively reject the scientific evidence that consistently affirms the safety of childhood immunizations against measles and other diseases. Some, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., leverage pseudoscience and attempt to drive public focus to outlier adverse events. Others bypass even the attempt at creating a veneer of scientific legitimacy and straightforwardly embrace conspiracy theories instead. Since 2018, anti-vaccine communities have cross-pollinated extensively with QAnon and other paranoid fantasies. Participants in anti-vaccine groups online frequently see posts claiming that the government is using COVID-19 vaccines to secretly implant microchip identifiers in people, or that ingredients in vaccines will turn people into 5G antennas.
Turning us into 5G antennas? Think of how awesome our cell phone reception would be!
DiResta assigns some blame to the tech giants for allowing vaccine misinformation to spread on their platforms, but also notes that mass suppression by social media sites could easily backfire by feeding conspiracy theorists’ delusions of persecution. Right now, most sites are trying to walk a tightrope by putting warnings and fact-checks on dubious posts, while refraining from mass censorship. Search for hashtags like #antivaxxer on Instagram and you’ll get this warning page:
Even if social media disappeared tomorrow (a man can dream…) the mistrust that shepherds people toward conspiracist beliefs is still there:
Countering bottom-up, grassroots-driven propaganda is a significant challenge for anyone who wants the vaccination effort to succeed and the pandemic to end. Since much of it plays out on social media, it’s often seen as a social-media problem. This is partially true: Laissez-faire attitudes in Silicon Valley enabled these factions to grow for years. Platforms only began to take significant action to minimize the impact of anti-vaccine pages in 2019, after major measles outbreaks in Brooklyn and Samoa. As old diseases gained new footholds, Congress began to ask questions about the amplification and recommendation of health misinformation.
Tech platforms continued their newfound commitment to countering health misinformation this year, as COVID-19 spread around the world. However, the results have been mixed: Anti-vaccine activists reacted early to the new pathogen. As the news out of China was just beginning to indicate that something was terribly wrong, anti-vaxxers were already making claims that the disease was a vast plot to force mandatory adult vaccination. Despite concerted efforts to crack down on health misinformation following the measles outbreaks, some of the old-guard anti-vaccine influencers—including Kennedy—who pivoted to coronavirus-related scaremongering saw huge audience growth.
Social-media takedowns are not the right approach to addressing this content because they turn the propaganda into forbidden knowledge, often increasing the demand. Down-ranking and deprecating anti-vaccine content can minimize some of its reach, but it doesn’t address the underlying lack of trust in institutions, pharmaceutical products, or government. Restoring that trust requires far more work, but time has run out. The coronavirus vaccines are new, without years of data about efficacy or long-term effects. They have also been politicized, and not just by QAnon enthusiasts; during the 2020 campaign, many on the left, including the Democratic nominees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, expressed concern about receiving a vaccine that the Trump administration had rushed to approve.
“Prebunking”—preemptively addressing misinformation that people are likely to see—may be the way forward…
Anti-vaxxers appear everywhere on Facebook, but they aren’t even close to a majority. Those of us who do accept the science about vaccines should try to counter the conspiracy theories whenever we see our friends posting them.
The problem is, how do you change the mind of the person who wants to believe in wide-ranging conspiracies?
On a related note, 2020 isn’t done with us just yet:
The federal government is restricting travel from the U.K. for 72 hours in an effort to keep a contagious new strain of the virus that causes COVID-19 out of Canada.
The travel ban comes into effect first thing Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Twitter after an hours-long meeting with members of the Incident Response Group.
[…]
Those travel bans follow British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's announcement that Christmas shopping and gatherings in southern England must be cancelled because of rapidly spreading infections blamed on the new coronavirus variant.
The new strain is wreaking havoc on the U.K., accounting for 60 per cent of new infections in London in December. The country recorded 35,928 further confirmed cases on Sunday, around double the number from a week earlier.
Viruses mutate regularly, and scientists have found thousands of different mutations among samples of the virus causing COVID-19. Many of these changes have no effect on how easily the virus spreads or how severe symptoms are.
The British government has said the strain has been circulating since September, but it wasn't until the last week that there was enough evidence to declare that it has higher transmissibility than other circulating coronaviruses.
The Professor (my favorite one-off Simpsons character, beating out Frank Grimes) may say it’s time to panic, but Tom Chivers at UnHerd says this new strain may be more contagious but not necessarily more deadly:
With viruses that have recently jumped from another species, such as SARS-Cov2, says Birney, there are usually two main pressures driving change. One is obvious: viruses that can jump more easily between hosts will tend to spread better, so viruses tend to become more efficient at transmission. Another is perhaps less so: viruses tend to become less deadly, because if your disease kills your host in two hours, you won’t have much time to get to the next one. “Viruses when they jump, usually do two things,” says Birney. “They end up mutating to transmit faster, and often to cause less disease. That’s the pathway to becoming an endemic virus.”
[…]
Birney says that “hospitalisation rates in the South-East [where the new strain is widespread] are not a million miles away from what you’d expect given the infection rate”, so at the moment we can only say that it’s probably not loads more or loads less dangerous. Javid says that one mutation is similar to one found in a Singapore strain which seemed to cause less deadly disease in animal trials, but again, he says, that’s speculative.
More importantly, most experts say existing COVID-19 vaccines should work against it:
Existing vaccines for Covid-19 will be effective in fighting off infection from new strains of the coronavirus, multiple experts told CNBC on Monday.
The comments came after the U.K. on Saturday said it identified a new mutation of the virus that can spread more quickly than previous variants.
Countries including Italy, Germany, Canada and Israel have barred flights from the U.K. following reports of the new strain.
Vin Gupta, an affiliate assistant professor from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said he’s confident that the current vaccines will protect against different strains of Covid.
“There is a strong belief here that the vaccine, as it exists today … will have effectiveness in warding off infection from this new strain in England, in addition to the old strain that we’ve been contending with for months now,” said Gupta.
That’s because at the genetic level, the new strain is likely to be “very similar” to prior strains, he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday.
Yet more reason to take on vaccine misinformation wherever you see it. I’ll leave you with this poignant section of Chivers’ article, illustrating how Christmas in the UK has been affected:
…I hopped into the car and rushed off to a motorway service station just outside London, where I met a grandparent, swapped a bunch of hastily wrapped gifts, paid our socially distanced respects, and set off home. What was poignant was that I saw several — five or six, probably — pairs of cars in the car park, boots open, presents ready, doing the same thing. The motorway was much busier than I would have expected on a normal Saturday night. As I was driving home a song was dedicated on the radio to a granddad who was driving from Hereford to Swansea to get his kids their presents. It was gently heartbreaking.
Titiana McGrath, prophetess of our age:
Kids drew rainbows long before they became associated with LGBT. It seems doubtful to claim to support tolerance - of anyone at all - by being intolerant of this. Most of all, perhaps we should remember that setting a good example by being tolerant and reasonable ourselves is the best way to teach tolerance and reason to others.
Regarding anti-vaxxers, it’s a good example of how people often can be their own greatest obstacle. Generally, more attention should be drawn to the *numbers* of people with such beliefs, since the attention drawn by them makes them seem bigger than they really are.
Maybe actual vaccination rates, adverse effect rates and the percentage of unvaccinated persons should be part of notices pointing out misinformation...?