Covid-19 will be defeated when the online plague of anti-vaxxers has been outwitted
IF YOU’LL forgive me, I begin today with unparliamentary language. Brandolini’s Law – or the bulls**t asymmetry principle – states: “The amount of energy needed to refute bulls**it is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” You see, the vaccine is coming; but so are the anti-vaxxers. The year of plague may soon be over – once enough people are willing to take the vaccine. Procurement and logistics are understandably top of the agenda for the high-level task force on Covid-19 vaccination, which had its first meeting on Monday. But “vaccine hesitancy”, as Ronan Glynn has warned, could undermine the miracle.
Doubt is the only weapon needed. It flourishes in the fertile ground of the internet. Its fruit is word of mouth.
The task force must understand how disinformation works to defeat it. Radio ads won’t cut it.
The leaflet in the door will be binned.
Vaccines were once seen as a miracle – but people, especially the young, have forgotten how diseases like measles, polio and TB ravaged our society. Smallpox was eradicated by science, not homeopathy.
Since Andrew Wakefield did his dastardly work undermining the MMR shot, doctors continually have to defend vaccines from people who’ve never seen a child die from measles and fritter on about “natural immunity”.
Ironically, a side-effect of the CervicalCheck crisis – women dying from cervical cancer – was to convince more parents their daughters needed the HPV vaccine. Take-up rates had dropped to 50pc after unsubstantiated allegations of side-effects took hold. Last year it reached 70pc.
The annual flu vaccine has faced hesitancy, even within the health service. Only five years ago, the take-up rate by healthcare workers in hospitals was just 22pc.
Since flu kills several hundred people per year – usually older people who are patients in hospitals or nursing homes – that was absolutely shocking. Thankfully due to huge work to combat vaccine scepticism, it’s crawled up year on year since. This year, 58pc of hospital staff have received it.
Although, even then, you wonder why more than 40pc of health workers still refuse to get this basic shot.
Meanwhile a nasal spray version of the flu vaccine is available for free at the local chemist for all children aged between two and 12 years, yet so far only 30pc of the supplies have been used. I think that’s due to low awareness of the scheme, a poor reflection on the communications strategy.
With these less than stellar rates for the bog standard flu vaccine, you’d have to worry about the Covid-19 vaccine. With the stakes higher for this virus, people should be heavily incentivised to grab the vaccine first chance they get.
As always, one should watch American capitalism for a sign of what will come to us. Ticketmaster is developing a system for people to prove their vaccination status before attending major events. That will be both effective and divisive.
So I’ve three bits of advice for the task force.
First, the big attack will be made on the speed of vaccine development.
That’s why the story must be told now of how that happened. It’s due to many factors. Huge time in drug research is spent on funding applications, but money was thrown at Covid-19.
The pharmaceutical firms assumed major risk by setting up manufacturing lines in advance of approval, which normally they’d never do. It can be slow finding enough people to take part in drug trials, but there were lots of volunteers for these trials. Finally, scientists were able to build on research already done on coronavirus vaccines.
Obviously we’re still waiting on peer-reviewed data but the narrative needs to be created now; not in six months fighting a rearguard action.
Second, we need confidence in the Government itself. The announcement of the task force’s first meeting conveyed the impression we were only now thinking about the rollout. In the same week German citizens were being allocated a vaccine station.
However a lot of work has already gone into procurement and logistics. For instance, we’re a part of the European Union system that has placed bulk orders for four of the vaccines.
The task force needs to keep us informed of all this rather than having information dragged out of them. I’d also advise them not to go into defensive mode. We’ve a lot of smart people in this country.
All too often Irish governments interpret external advice as criticism. Widening the sphere of expertise beyond officials is not a sign of weakness, but strength. They’ve never done this before. So take advice; not the hump.
Finally, they need a deep understanding of how people get their information. Disinformation is never spread by ads.
While the “anti-vaxxer” might be a sinister young white male who’s a member of some shady far-right organisation; he’s only the start of the cycle.
He seeds the story on Facebook, from multiple fake accounts, usually claiming to be a nurse, or the sister of a nurse, and sits back.
What happens next is the real problem. It jumps off Facebook to the WhatsApp groups and school gates; the concerned mother telling her friend about that thing she read on the internet.
The “anti-vaxxer” is now your sister, friend or neighbour and you’re in real trouble. She’s the person you need to convince.
Brandolini’s Law tells us is it requires far more energy to spread facts than doubt. The anti-vaxxers are already hard at work. We should be too.
The ‘anti-vaxxer’ is only the start of the cycle. He seeds the story on Facebook, from multiple fake accounts, usually claiming to be a nurse, or the sister of a nurse and sits back