Truth decay: Anti-vaxxersOnline anti-vax efforts prove daunting public health challenge

Published 11 April 2019

Earlier this week New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot blamed a small group of anti-vaccine advocates for their role in an ongoing measles outbreak among the city’s Orthodox Jewish population. In many Western countries, public health officials and scientists charge that an aggressive, conspiracy-fueled misinformation campaign by anti-vaxxers has caused the re-emergence of preventable diseases such as measles.

Earlier this week New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, MD, blamed a small group of anti-vaccine advocates for their role in an ongoing measles outbreak among the city’s Orthodox Jewish population.

“This outbreak is being fueled by a small group of anti-vaxxers in these neighborhoods. They have been spreading dangerous misinformation based on fake science,” Barbot said.

Barbot’s statement is one of the strongest examples of the new reality facing public health officials in 2019: They must track and control infectious disease outbreaks, while simultaneously fighting public misinformation about vaccine use and safety.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced it would no longer allow the promotion of anti-vaccine messages in ads, but will not take remove anti-vaccine posts. Pinterest has also recently taken steps to limit misinformation, including disabling the phrase “anti-vaccine” from its search tool.

But Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, a Houston pediatrician and an expert in vaccinology, worries these efforts may prove to be too little, too late.

“The anti-vaccine movement is like its own media empire,” said Hotez. “It’s like Fox News or MSNBC; they have co-opted Amazon’s website, and they are amplified on Facebook and YouTube. And the defense of vaccines is left to a handful of academics. It’s not adequate.”

Individual stories, coordinated attacks
Niko Yiannakoulias PhD, a professor at McMaster University, recently co-authored a study published in Vaccine that looked at vaccine videos posted on YouTube in 2018.

CIDRAP reports that his team found 1 million YouTube videos after searching “flu shot” in May 2018 and more than 45,000 for “measles vaccine.” Yiannakoulias and his colleagues analyzed the top 150 videos for “flu shot” or “measles vaccine” for pro-, neutral, or anti-immunization messaging.

They found that anti-vaccine videos got more “likes” and views that pro-vaccine videos, and only 17 percent of “flu shot” videos were pro-vaccine. What surprised Yiannakoulias the most, however, was the creators of the videos.