r/publichealth • u/healthbeatnews • 3d ago
RESOURCE Q&A: How a vaccine advocate turns down the temperature in discussions around hesitancy
https://www.healthbeat.org/atlanta/2025/08/27/vaccine-hesitancy-trust-empathy/5
u/grandmawaffles 3d ago
I’ve been saying this for a while; there isn’t enough emphasis on behavioral science in public health.
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u/birdflustocks 3d ago
1/2
"It’s easy to blame social media, but the problem is us. We’re the problem because we’re not engaged with each other."
Public health as a discipline should have a solid understanding about how and why disinformation spreads, where it originates from, and what to do about it. But the discussion is stuck in the 20th century. Instead of pointing out which specific people are responsible, this person advocates for more love or something while public health collapses and people die.
A disturbing amount of people has a pathological worldview, especially if you consider that people believe in many conspiracies at the same time. Everything is a conspiracy to them, always has been. Take a look at table 3 of this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9299316/
Open societies in general fail to criminalize harmful medical disinformation with commercial intent like denial of germ theory, that viruses even exist. ELSEVIER is even knowingly complicit:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987705005906?via%3Dihub
https://drsambailey.com/resources/videos/viruses-unplugged/taking-away-your-chickens/
"On behalf of the Editors of the journal, I would like to clarify that we did not find any relation between the news in the New Zealand Herald and the article published in Medical Hypotheses. Our journal is different from the other conventional journals and focuses on publishing innovative and groundbreaking ideas in the form of hypotheses."
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u/birdflustocks 3d ago
2/2
"Recent research suggests that superspreaders of misinformation—users who consistently disseminate a disproportionately large amount of low-credibility content—may be at the center of this problem. In the political domain, one study investigated the impact of misinformation on the 2016 U.S. election and found that 0.1% of Twitter users were responsible for sharing approximately 80% of the misinformation. Social bots also played a disproportionate role in spreading content from low-credibility sources. The Election Integrity Partnership (a consortium of academic and industry experts) reported that during the 2020 presidential election, a small group of “repeat spreaders” aggressively pushed false election claims across various social media platforms for political gain.
In the health domain, analysis of the prevalence of low-credibility content related to the COVID-19 “infodemic” on Facebook and Twitter showed that superspreaders on both of these platforms were popular pages and accounts that had been verified by the platforms. In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate reported that just 12 accounts—the so-called “disinformation dozen”—were responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media. This is concerning because eroding the public’s trust in vaccines can be especially dangerous during a pandemic and evidence suggests that increased exposure to vaccine-related misinformation may reduce one’s willingness to get vaccinated.
Despite the growing evidence that superspreaders play a crucial role in the spread of misinformation, we lack a systematic understanding of who these superspreader accounts are and how they behave. This gap may be partially due to the fact that there is no agreed-upon method to identify such users; in the studies cited above, superspreaders were identified based on different definitions and methods. Recent research suggests that superspreaders of misinformation—users who consistently disseminate a disproportionately large amount of low-credibility content—may be at the center of this problem."
Source: Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter
"We used a simple method based on a nationally representative dataset to estimate the preventable deaths among unvaccinated individuals in the US from May 30, 2021 to September 3, 2022 adjusted for the effects of age and time. We estimated that at least 232,000 deaths could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults during the 15 months had they been vaccinated with at least a primary series."
Source: Estimated preventable COVID-19-associated deaths due to non-vaccination in the United States
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/birdflustocks 3d ago
It's virtue signaling. It's a lot nicer to advocate for trust and community than reducing people to vectors of disease and disinformation.
"In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate reported that just 12 accounts—the so-called “disinformation dozen”—were responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media."
"These days, whenever anything spreads, whether it's a YouTube fad or a political rumor, we say it went viral. But how does virality actually work? In The Rules of Contagion, epidemiologist Adam Kucharski explores topics including gun violence, online manipulation, and, of course, outbreaks of disease to show how much we get wrong about contagion, and how astonishing the real science is."
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u/Direct_Fondant_3125 1d ago
I hope this works. There are too many children suffering from their parents’ ignorance.
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u/healthbeatnews 3d ago
Karen Ernst is the director of Voices for Vaccines, a national organization focused on increasing vaccination rates by providing accurate information to families. The organization is part of the Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta.
Ernst, who lives in Minnesota but often travels to Atlanta, is a former English teacher who became a public health leader focused on “bringing people to this place of calm and good information, and helping to protect as many families and communities as possible.” Ernst was featured in the documentary Shot in the Arm, which aired on PBS and was executive produced by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
In Georgia, and nationally, childhood vaccination rates are decreasing, according to data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Georgia has reported six measles cases in unvaccinated people this year. Some vaccine hesitancy is driven by misinformation on social media, research shows. Vaccines are safe and help save lives, scientists and doctors emphasize.
Turning down the temperature on heated conversations on vaccines is part of Ernst’s approach, and her own questions and anxieties around vaccines when she was a new parent inform her empathetic approach to those conversations.