You don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to deduce that misinformation spreads on social media. It’s a problem that the social-media companies – Facebook and Twitter being two of the most prominent – have been battling for years.
But misinformation was seemingly turbo-charged when the coronavirus pandemic hit early last year. Suddenly we were inundated with claims of breakthrough cures to ones that purported the coronavirus was part of a global conspiracy – a claim that has been thoroughly debunked. These claims play on our fears of both the unknown and known.
If you think that these methods of spreading information are new – a product of the enlightened information age – then you would find yourself arguing with the experts. The truth is that this kind of rhetoric is part of a long arch of vaccine misinformation, which goes back to the very first vaccine in 1796.
Paula Larsson, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford who specialises in the history of vaccine hesitancy, said the narrative we see today is one that actually began 135 years ago.
“In the past, they [anti-vaxxers] said doctors were capitalising off of it, they were making money, that the state was trying to increase its control,” she said.
Larsson said anti-vaccination drives in the past tended to find its contours around certain prominent individuals. Writing in The Conversation last year, she offered the example of Dr Alexander M. Ross, who authored a popular pamphlet during the 1885 smallpox outbreak in Montreal.
Ross used strategies of anti-vaccination like minimising the threat of the disease to promote his case. Anyone familiar with anti-vaccination in Australia in the 21st century will see the parallels.
Even though 136 years has past – and an ocean separates Australia from Canada, where Ross spread his rhetoric – we can use this historical case and apply it to modern anti-vaxxers like Pete Evans, who had his social platforms yanked from him in late 2020 after spreading coronavirus misinformation. This came after Evans was investigated for promoting a $15,000 “subtle energy revitalisation platform” that he claimed could treat the coronavirus.
(To be sure, it couldn’t and doesn’t; Evans was fined by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.)
A vaccine being administered. Image from the Pan American Health Organisation from Flickr, used under Creative Commons.
But just as we can look to history for the problems, Larsson said we can look to history for solutions. Successful rollouts often had a personal element where doctors and influential community leaders often educated people about the benefits.
“That personal contact made a difference. The resistance to vaccines was often when vaccines were rolled out without a one-on-one conversation or without personal contact to every individual receiving,” Larsson said. Vaccine mandates, she said, where the state uses it coercive power, stoked resistance within communities historically.
But what’s inspiring in some countries is that these lessons appear to have been learnt. Despite the delays and setbacks, there is, Larsson said, optimism that we will overcome the coronavirus pandemic.
“The anti-vaccination sentiment that has risen in the last year is not a new thing and in the past has never really succeed in stopping a disease. A smallpox epidemic has never not stopped because of anti-vaccination.”
(Featured Image: ALPHA on Flickr.)
