UK to push companies to fight anti-vax info

LONDON — Britain’s government plans to call a summit of social media companies to discuss what more they can do to fight online misinformation about vaccines.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressed concern Monday at the rising incidence of measles. He said Britain had a great record in fighting the disease but things were suddenly “going in the wrong direction,” with 230 new measles cases in the first few months of this year.

“I’m afraid people have been listening to that superstitious mumbo jumbo on the internet, all that anti-vax stuff and thinking that the MMR vaccine is a bad idea,” he said while visiting a hospital in southwestern England. “That’s wrong.”

Social media companies have struggled to combat fake news of all sorts, from political propaganda to bogus warnings about vaccines such as MMR for measles, mumps, and rubella.

Pinterest, a leading online repository of vaccine misinformation, took a step in 2017 to block all searches for the term “vaccines.” Facebook, meanwhile, said in March that it would no longer recommend groups and pages that spread hoaxes about vaccines and that it would reject ads that do this.

But anti-vax information still slips through. That includes soundly debunked notions that vaccines cause autism or that mercury preservatives and other substances in them can harm people.

Some experts fear that the online spread of bad information about vaccines is planting or reinforcing fears in parents, contributing to a comeback in recent years of certain dangerous childhood diseases, including measles.

Measles is highly infectious and health officials say at least about 95% of the population must be immunized to prevent outbreaks. In May, Public Health England estimated that about 87% of children aged five had gotten both doses.

According to the World Health Organization, there were more reported measles cases worldwide in the first six months of 2019 than in any year since 2006.