Anti-vax myth sharing ‘should be an offence’

SPREADING anti-vaccination myths should be made a criminal offence and the public should report offenders, the Royal Society and British Academy has said, amid concerns that fears over a Covid vaccine will damage uptake.

A review on Covid-19 vaccine deployment calls for the public to be “inoculated” against misinformation online. Several countries already have laws against disseminating information harmful to public health. Singapore has recently carried out four prosecutions under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act for coronavirus offences.

Under the same legislation, companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are also legally required to correct or remove misinformation.

Prof Melinda Mills, director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford, and lead author of the review, said it was critical to address genuine concerns about the vaccine, while preventing misleading facts spreading online.

“This information can be really damaging, and it’s clever how they spread it, t hrough memes and memorable things,” she said. “These groups are very skilled. They feed on fear, that little grain of truth and they amplify it. It’s not very interesting when the Government produces passive web pages that say vaccinations are safe, the anti-vaxxers turn everything into a show, they put out things that are engaging.

“Social media channels try to capture this misinformation, but they can’t get everything and so it’s important that the public can spot it so that they don’t share it. Most people aren’t bad, they just don’t realise they are sharing a whole load of misinformation.”

Experts are concerned that the uptake for the vaccine will fall short

unless more is done to address the misconceptions on social media.

Research has shown that about 36 per cent of people in Britain said they were either uncertain or very unlikely to be vaccinated against the virus. Prof Mills added: “The public thinks it takes decades to make a vaccine, so it has to be communicated that it is safe. There are always going to be side effects and that has to be acknowledged, too.

“Everyone is concerned about this rushed vaccine so let’s talk about it. There needs to be a dialogue and that will work better at a local level.”