Vaccine disinformation is “only going to get worse” with potentially disastrous consequences, one expert has said.

With flu hospitalisations rising and vaccine fatigue creeping in following covid-19, Ireland is already feeling the consequences of vaccine disinformation.

On The Pat Kenny Show, award-winning science writer David Robert Grimes said Irish doctor Michael Ryan has warned the World Health Organisation (WHO) Health Emergencies Committee that “vaccine disinformation is only going to get worse”.

“Now we've witnessed, since the COVID era, a massive increase in [vaccine disinformation] but back in 2019, even before COVID was a thing that people knew about, vaccine hesitancy was declared a top 10 threat to public health,” he said.

“[This was] because around the world, different areas had stopped vaccinating because they were encountering scary anti-vaccine disinformation online.

“So, the fact that this is going to get worse, Michael Ryan is absolutely correct on that, but it's quite a worrying prospect for us going forward.”

Threat to world health

Mr Grimes said Dr Ryan is not the only person talking about this threat to world health.

“This week in The New York Times, Elliot Higgins from Bellingcat, the investigative organisation, said that fact checking alone doesn't work, and there's a reason for that,” he said.

“Back in 2016 the Columbia Journalism Review came out and said that the fact they we are all using social media to get our news is making us increasingly polarised because we don't necessarily have good media literacy.

“We see a headline that agrees with our prejudices or amplifies our fears, and we subscribe to that, and that puts us into an echo chamber or a filter bubble well away from other sources.”

Social media

Mr Grimes said that one solution proposed was that social media companies be more “proactive in their moderation”.

“I don't think that's going to happen,” he said.

“The second solution proposed was that we need to become more media literate and have better critical thinking skills.

“If people have this information hygiene, where they stop and ask, ‘Is this information designed to scare me? Is it designed to engage me?’ - you're less likely to be negatively affected by it than if you emotionally buy in.”
Dr Ryan also said that vaccine hesitancy itself is not necessarily a bad thing.

"Spectrum"

Mr Grimes said that “what he means is there's a difference between saying that people are anti vaccine and pro vaccine in a simple binary”.

“We know that actually people are on a spectrum,” he said.

“They either accept everything, or they accept most, or they have fears, and we know that anti vaccine scepticism nudges people down the scale towards rejection.

“The classic example in Ireland was the HPV vaccine where most of the parents that weren't vaccinating their children weren’t dead in the wool anti-vaxxers, they were just scared.”

"Reassurance"

Mr Grimes said that people “need reassurance” around vaccines.

“The era of automatic trust and authority, trusting your doctors is gone, particularly when you can go online and find a bunch of fringe doctors who say the exact opposite,” he said.

Mr Grimes said there are risks with everything but the “fleeting side effects” have to be measured against “the fact [vaccines] are decreasing illness”.

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