The Fight Against Vaccine Misinformation
One morning in early December, Al Baker, the managing editor at Logically, a fact-checking startup in the United Kingdom, met with his team on Zoom. It was the first week of Britain’s COVID-19-vaccination drive, and Baker was a little on edge. Earlier that day, in Coventry, a ninety-year-old grandmother named Margaret Keenan became the first person in the U.K. to get the jab outside of a trial. “I’m wondering if we’re going to find people claiming that she doesn’t exist,” Baker told the group. Joe Ondrak, a senior researcher, said he would keep an eye out. (“I’m expecting some of that,” he added.) It didn’t take long. By the afternoon, Baker’s team had unearthed a Facebook post claiming, incorrectly, that the real Keenan had died in 2008, and that the woman on the news was a “crisis actor.” “Curious why Sky News cut away within seconds of Margaret taking the very first Covid vaccine? THIS IS WHY!” it read. “Wakey, Wakey, people!”
Like the U.S., Britain has had an exceptionally bad pandemic, tallying some hundred and twenty-five thousand deaths so far, more than in any other European nation. Amid the long winter—England has observed an especially strict lockdown since January 4th—Britain’s vaccine rollout has been a bright spot, unfurling at a rapid pace in hospitals and clinics across the country. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, has said that all adults will be eligible for a vaccine shot by the end of July. Herd immunity through vaccination represents the U.K.’s best path out of lockdown. But the speed of the rollout, while encouraging, has also caused confusion. The U.K. government, once set on doling out two doses three or four weeks apart, has since pivoted to administering one dose to as many at-risk people as possible, with a follow-up dose after twelve weeks. In January, the New York Times reported that Britain, in some circumstances, would allow a “mix-and-match vaccine regimen,” which the editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal and Public Health England quickly refuted. “All of this stuff is engendering distrust,” Edie Miller, the deputy editor of Logically, told me.
As the rollout continues, vaccine hesitancy threatens to sink efforts to reach herd immunity. In a September study by University College London, about a fifth of respondents in the U.K. said that they were “on balance more unlikely than likely” to “very unlikely” to accept a vaccination. A study published in Nature last month showed that misinformation had a significant effect on vaccine uptake. The number of Brits who said they would “definitely” accept the vaccine dropped by 6.2 percentage points after they were exposed to common conspiracies—that Bill Gates was plotting against his fellow-Americans, for instance. A critical mass of a population needs to adopt the vaccine for herd immunity to be reached. As Heidi Larson, who worked on the study, put it, “Vaccines only work if people take them.”
Logically has been one of a number of organizations working to track misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19. The company was founded, in 2017, by Lyric Jain, after he watched his classmates at Cambridge react very differently during the Brexit campaign than friends in his conservative home town. “They had access to completely different information,” Jain, who is twenty-five, told me. “It felt like people lost a way of communicating with each other.” Logically uses a combination of artificial-intelligence software and a team of fact checkers to develop reports about misleading content. Recently, the company has been monitoring chatter around the vaccine rollout. In December, it released a report, “Not Anti-Vaccine, Anti COVID-Vaccine: Misinformation Trends in the UK.” “Anti-vaxxers tend to believe that diseases such as measles exist, but disagree with vaccinations being necessary to curb their spread,” it reads. In contrast, “anti-COVID vaxxers believe that COVID-19 is a hoax or has been dramatically overstated in order to force an unnecessary vaccine on the population.” If you don’t believe COVID-19 exists, there’s no reason to take a vaccine.
Logically found such arguments on Mumsnet, a U.K.-based Web site and online forum where people can pose questions and post anonymously—a kind of mainstream Reddit for parents. In discussion threads about the COVID-19 vaccine, “users were often keen to emphasize their openness to vaccination in general, before going on to detail concerns about the potential COVID-19 vaccine specifically.” Scrolling through the posts one day, I found many that expressed anxiety about the speed with which the COVID-19 vaccine was developed. Other posters worried about it impacting fertility. (Claims that the vaccine will cause infertility have been debunked.) This trend, Logically concluded, “is particularly dangerous as it opens vaccine resistance up to a new demographic who are not typically susceptible to anti-vax messaging.”
One afternoon, during the first week of Britain’s rollout, I met with Ondrak, the senior researcher, on Zoom, to see how the company’s misinformation-tracking efforts were going. “The sentiment really does seem to be ‘I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but,’ ” he told me. He shared his screen to show me programs that he has been using to track broad narratives around the vaccines. He read out some of the search terms. “We’ve got ‘rush,’ ‘corruption,’ ‘microchips,’ ” he said. “ ‘Gates Foundation’ is in there, as well. ‘Unsafe.’ We’ve got a wild card in there for anything around ‘infertile’ or ‘sterilization.’ ” He pulled up the top-shared URLs that week and opened one at random, a post on a Web site called Health and Money News which had more than seven thousand shares. “Yep, exactly what you’d expect it to be,” he said. “Head of Pfizer Research: COVID Vaccine Is Female Sterilization,” the headline read. (A Pfizer spokesperson and a number of experts later confirmed to the A.P. that there is no link between the vaccine and female sterilization.) “This is what we see a lot of,” Ondrak said.
Edie Miller told me that many of the disinformation narratives that Logically has studied in the U.K. revolved around health-care workers, playing on the cultural prominence that nurses and doctors have taken on during the pandemic (The N.H.S. is “like a national religion,” she said.) Videos often style the health-care worker as a “whistle-blower,” with footage of supposedly empty coronavirus wards. Others seem to suggest that they’re in on the conspiracy. “There’s this feeling that health-care workers are going to save us, or that they could condemn us all to get microchips,” Miller said. Some narratives seem to dissipate after a few days. Others, such as a debunked theory that 5G providers are linked to the pandemic, have staying power, and tangible consequences: in the U.K., there have been a hundred and sixty arson attacks on cell-phone-communications infrastructure since the start of the pandemic. It can be hard to tell what’s “just a flash in the pan,” Miller said, and what “gets subsumed into the culture, and sticks around as received wisdom.”
A few weeks later, I checked back in with Ondrak and Miller. The rumor about the Pfizer vaccine causing female sterilization, which was trending when we last spoke, seemed to have petered out. Ondrak had traced the trajectory of the Health and Money News post. It drew from an article on a fringe German site, which had also been picked up by Zero Hedge, a far-right blog, and Global Research, a well-known hub for conspiracy theories. Soon afterward, fact-checking sites and mainstream news organizations began publishing correctives. Eventually, shares of the conspiracy had died down—for now. “The article’s still cropping up here and there,” Ondrak said. “It lies in wait for the next person to potentially make it trend again.”
As vaccination efforts around the world ramp up, organizations tracking misinformation and disinformation narratives have found themselves deluged. When I spoke to Heidi Larson, who leads the team that published the recent misinformation study in Nature, she sounded a little tired. “It’s been full on,” she told me. Larson is a professor of anthropology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and the author of the book “Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start—and Why They Don’t Go Away.” She is also the head of the Vaccine Confidence Project, which tracks public confidence in vaccines around the world. She had recently been quoted in the Guardian, urging ministers to stop boasting about the U.K.’s rollout. “The message—‘We are the first ones in the world to get there’—may be a message to other countries but that does not matter if you don’t have your public behind you,” she told the paper.
Larson has identified certain false narratives that are especially effective in eroding vaccine confidence. When participants were shown anti-vax material that seemed to be rooted in science, for example, they were more likely to be swayed. “The more scientific-looking pieces had more impact,” Larson said. One image, which had already been shared widely online, showed DNA and RNA spirals, and warned, baselessly, that mRNA vaccines will “literally alter your DNA.” (“It will wrap itself into your system,” the caption read. “You will essentially become a genetically modified human being.”) The image “looks like it’s straight out of a genomics textbook,” Larson said. It got more traction than one that hinted, not subtly, at a global conspiracy to reduce population numbers through the pandemic and the vaccine. It showed a shadowy Bill Gates in dark glasses, like an action star “in a Bollywood film or something,” Larson said.
Researchers point out that, often, false information is spread accidentally, or out of genuine concern. But sometimes it seems more purposeful. Renée DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, studies how narratives cross platforms or jump between communities—from niche anti-vax echo chambers online, say, to a friendly neighborhood Facebook group. She brought up a conspiracy-laden video purporting to expose the truth about COVID-19, “Plandemic,” which went viral in May. It features a woman named Judy Mikovits as a kind of public-health whistle-blower. DiResta’s team found that Mikovits has had a long history of promoting anti-vax theories, but that her posts have usually stayed within the confines of anti-vaccine and natural-health communities. Before the release of “Plandemic,” however, DiResta’s group found that Mikovits had suddenly amassed thousands of new Twitter followers, many of which were brand-new accounts. After the video went out, it was picked up by followers of QAnon, and then by mainstream Trump supporters. From there, it found its way into local community chat groups and message boards.
“Information moves from the bottom up,” DiResta told me. “It’s a meme or something that takes place within a single community that then finds its way through human connectors” into larger and larger communities. DiResta’s team also found that effective disinformation often contains “a grain of truth.” Videos showing people claiming to have experienced a severe vaccine side effect—anaphylactic shock, for instance—are common. It’s not that the testimonials are necessarily false (though some are), but that they are taken out of context—the vast majority of people do not experience anaphylaxis—and “woven into the overarching narrative that the vaccine is fundamentally unsafe,” DiResta said.
Imran Ahmed, the C.E.O. of the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has been monitoring misinformation and disinformation during the pandemic, told me that anti-vaxxers are far outnumbered by the vaccine-hesitant, people who are just anxious about getting a vaccine. “There are millions and millions of vaccine-hesitant people, and there are a few anti-vaxxers,” he said. Still, it’s a vocal minority. “Anti-vaxxers are an industry,” Ahmed said. “They are a sophisticated proselytization machine,” motivated by money, power, the desire to create chaos, and, in some cases, a sincere belief that the public has been duped. In a recent report, “The Anti-Vaxx Playbook,” the C.C.D.H. pointed out that although doctors and governments need to convince the vaccine-hesitant to take a specific action, anti-vaxxers only need to persuade them to do nothing. “All they need to do is raise doubt,” Ahmed said.
In December, DiResta wrote a piece for The Atlantic arguing that society’s return to normalcy depends on the effective countering of misinformation by public-health authorities. It also hangs “on whether average Americans recognize that the material they click on and share has real world consequences.” There are encouraging signs that public opinion is changing. A recent study by Imperial College London and YouGov found that willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccine had increased among thousands of participants in Europe, Asia, and Australia, from forty per cent, in November, to more than fifty per cent, in January. In late February, another study found that ninety-two per cent of Brits surveyed said that they had already had or would receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
Larson told me that governments should be putting their “biggest efforts into getting the public engaged.” “Go out into the communities that we know are a bit more anxious,” she said. “We have to do town-hall-type things and sit with groups and understand their questions and concerns now, before they’re lining up at the clinic with vaccines, because that’s too late.” Community efforts have ramped up in the U.K. Near Neighbours, a charity with local hubs across England, has been running a communications campaign in more than a dozen languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin, Polish, Romanian, Somali, and Urdu. One flyer reads “I’m taking the vaccine, are you?” in Gujarati; another message, a short video, answers the question “Why was the vaccine created so quickly, and is it safe?” Near Neighbours’s Lazzaro Pietragnoli told me that the campaign used photos of real community volunteers to deliver the messages. “What is important for us is not just to repeat information but to have testimonials from people who have the trust of the community,” he said.
Spiritual leaders have also stepped up. Not long ago, Qari Asim, a senior imam at Makkah Mosque, in Leeds, and the chair of the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board, attended a Webinar intended to address vaccine fears in the Muslim community. In late December, he told the panel, he had noticed an anxious energy at the mosque. It was directed toward the vaccine: Was it safe? Was it halal? Younger members were worried about rumors of 5G radiation, or the idea of tracking chips placed in their arms, the older ones about horror stories of gruesome side effects. The conversations were tricky. “Misinformation is something that’s ongoing,” Asim told me. One “cannot put a lid on it.”
At the end of the year, Asim drafted a sermon. He invoked passages of the Quran that pointed toward trusting health-care professionals. In a short video, he assured listeners that the vaccines were halal (“They do not contain any gelatin, alcohol, animal product, or human embryo cells”), and that they did not contain microchips. In January, a week after the Oxford and AstraZeneca vaccine launched in the U.K., Asim’s sermon was delivered by imams at a hundred-plus mosques across the country. Since then, more than two hundred and fifty mosques have participated.
On a recent Thursday, Asim made his way to Craven Road Medical Practice, in Leeds, where he had signed on to volunteer at a vaccination clinic. He was wearing a long white robe under a dark blazer, and a white Turkish-style cap. After checking in, he stationed himself by the door, where he greeted patients and directed them toward the vaccination station. Some people “were very jolly,” he told me. Others were “maybe a little bit nervous.” A few of the patients arriving for the jab were congregants from Asim’s mosque. “I had a chat with one or two of them about, you know, ‘What stories are they going to tell to their family members?’ ” he said. He told them he hoped they would pass on the message that “it’s just an injection, like any other injection that they may have had in their lives, including many vaccines.”
Later, he said that the shift had gone well. The members were “pleasantly surprised to see me there,” he said. He hoped his presence had boosted their confidence. “They can see that I don’t have to be there, but I am there.”
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