UK gears up for coronavirus anti-vax battle

LONDON — Britain is braced for an information war. 

Governments and health organizations have fought the anti-vaccine, or “anti-vax,” movement for decades. But the coronavirus pandemic, coupled with the boom in social media platforms, means the stakes are now higher than ever. 

The U.K. government wants to fight the misinformation virus on multiple fronts, with a rebuttal team at the center aided by Whitehall departments spreading positive messages in their areas and working with social media firms to take down damaging content. But there are questions over whether the state — and online platforms themselves — have what it takes for the fight. 

With hopes a vaccine rollout could begin before the end of the year, ministers must get on top of damaging narratives fast.

“It takes time to shift attitudes,” said Jamie Njoku-Goodwin, who until recently worked on the U.K.’s coronavirus crisis response as a special adviser to Health Secretary Matt Hancock. “You can’t do a week-long campaign and hope everything will be normal. You don’t want to get to a situation where we have a vaccine ready to roll out and 25 percent of the population would refuse to take it. That would undermine the whole program.”

The latest polling from YouGov suggests around a fifth of Brits are unlikely to take the vaccine — although just 4 percent of the population said it was because they do not trust the high-profile Pfizer project, while 2 percent said they were opposed to vaccinations in general.

Armies of online disinformation warriors at home and abroad will, however, be doing their best to push those numbers up. 

Dangerous claims

The Department of Health got a taste of the disinformation war early in the pandemic. First, there was a wave of claims across the globe that 5G phone masts were helping to spread the virus. Then anti-testing conspiracies began to spread.

Further back, a rise in measles and mumps outbreaks among university students in recent years also served as a wake-up call to ministers. This was considered evidence that the false 1998 claim linking the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism had had an effect. The U.K. lost its “measles-free” status in 2019.

Conspiracies around coronavirus could be just as damaging. A range of outlandish theories have been picked up by the government’s rapid response unit, a team in the Cabinet Office and Downing Street that scours the web for disinformation to help government departments counter it or push for removal. 

According to a Cabinet Office official, the team is monitoring false claims such as that children will be vaccinated without parental consent; that the army will force people to take a vaccine; that people taking part in a vaccine trial died; and a claim pushed by Russia that the vaccine could turn people into chimpanzees. 

The rapid response unit has been reinforced with a counter-disinformation unit, another official said, bringing together staff from across different departments to work out how to fight false claims.

Ministers get weekly reports on coronavirus trends online which throw up a lot of the madcap theories gaining traction. Piers Corbyn, brother of former opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn who is vehemently anti-vax, is said to come up a lot.

Other areas of government are also involved in the disinformation fight. The Times reported this month that U.K. spy agency GCHQ has been tasked with rooting out false claims pushed by hostile states, and that the Ministry of Defense is involved in the fight too. Government officials refused to confirm or deny the work was happening.

“The U.K. government is committed to combating the spread of false and misleading narratives online,” a government spokesperson said. “As we edge closer to a vaccine, we will work to quickly anticipate and mitigate any emerging anti-vax narratives.”

Pressure on social firms

But the main focus when it comes to combating false narratives online is on the social media sites that host them. At a recent meeting with Hancock and Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden, the Big Tech firms, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, promised to crack down on conspiracies and other anti-vax content on their platforms. 

The companies will meet with government officials at least once a month to give an update on their work and be held to account. Ministers’ central demands are that no one should profit from anti-vax content; that damaging posts should be removed at speed; and that monitoring teams should be boosted on evenings and weekends. 

“Letting vaccine disinformation spread unchecked could cost British lives and we cannot allow it to derail our fight against COVID-19,” Digital Minister Caroline Dinenage told POLITICO. “Through the pandemic we have stood up the counter disinformation unit and worked closely with social media companies to provide a comprehensive picture of the extent, scope and the reach of disinformation, and to quickly identify and respond to potentially harmful content on their platforms.”

Google, Facebook and Twitter insisted they have solid policies when dealing with false content on their platforms and actively push better sources of information.

One specific concern is WhatsApp, the popular encrypted messaging platform. “On Facebook and Twitter the misinformation is public,” said Njoku-Goodwin, the former Department of Health adviser. “You can see it, you can find it, you can follow the source and you can discredit it. When it comes to WhatsApp, none of that is possible.”

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, said in a statement it had limited the number of conversations people can forward messages to, put labels on content that has been forwarded multiple times and banned thousands of accounts that engage in mass messaging. 

But experts remain skeptical, and argue the tech firms do not have a good track record.

“Tech platforms are unable to keep up with new and emerging anti-vax narratives, resulting in enforcement decisions that are after-the-fact, inconsistent, and often too late to staunch the problems they are intended to solve,” said Anna-Sophie Harling, a managing director at NewsGuard, an anti-misinformation firm which has been flagging anti-vax misinformation to the World Health Organization.

The opposition Labour Party agrees that more work is needed, and called this month for new laws to fine social media firms that fail to take down harmful material about vaccines. The government is in the process of developing new laws to protect people online.

Positive thinking

The big challenge is how to fight misinformation narratives without fueling them. “Talking about how bad anti-vaxxers are ends up being counterproductive because all you do is give them more air time,” Njoku-Goodwin said. But he also believes there is an answer: “In government, lots of the conversation around anti-vax was about promoting the benefits of vaccines and how safe they are.”

Indeed, the core of the government’s approach is to pump good news about vaccines into the public domain and be open in answering questions and concerns, rather than get into a fight with conspiracists. 

An official in the Department of Health said the government was being as transparent as possible about what vaccines involve and the process to get them into circulation. Government scientific and medical officials are doing public briefings and will provide continual reassurance that the vaccine will go through all the protective measures and be safe for use. 

There will also be wider messages about the positive impact of vaccines. For example, after clean drinking water, vaccines are the most effective intervention for improving public health. Expect to hear lines like that drilled into the public through upcoming advertising campaigns. 

Meanwhile, the business department, which is in charge of pulling together the strands of vaccine development, will take a similar approach, reassuring people that, despite the speed of the process, no crucial safety steps are being skipped.

Government officials were buoyed by an Ipsos MORI poll this month that found the U.K. fared reasonably well compared with other nations when it comes to general faith in the benefits of vaccines. But the number has dropped since last year, and departments insist they are not complacent. 

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry reckons the government is on the right track. It has launched its own campaign to promote vaccines, and said telling the positive story about their benefits while engaging with concerns was the best way to address misinformation. 

Elliot Dunster, an executive director at the ABPI, said having trusted voices armed with facts to spread the message was one of the most important approaches. “I think the government is in the right place on this,” he said. “But it’s up to the whole [medical] community to play their role.”

Mark Scott contributed reporting.

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