Online anti-vaxxers, conflating Covid and MMR theories, are convincing parents against immunising their children
But she doesn’t know who to trust. “I’ve done some research but feel like a lot of the info on the web is pro-vaccine,” she writes.
Really makes you wonder, why that would be the case.
Disinformation has a body count. Don’t forget that when people play it off as “an easy mistake” or “alternative facts”.
As Ron White says, “you can’t fix stupid”. Seems to be an epidemic of it out there. If only there were a shot you could take…
The easiest way to enforce this is via schools, make it mandatory for children to be vaccinated if they want to go to school. That’ll get the holistic middle class nutters vaccinated in no time.
Doesn’t work when homeschooling is on an intense rise over the last two decades (in the US as example) https://www.nheri.org/big-growth-in-homeschooling-indicated-this-school-year/
It’s quite uncommon in the UK. They won’t homeschool their kids, they have jobs and careers themselves the only people who tend school kids are the lower working class who typically have a parent who doesn’t work and can therefore do it.
It’s not common for the middle class parents to homeschool their kids. Then the upper classes don’t do it because although they could afford to have a teacher invariably it’s looked down on something only the poor people do.
Agreed. I live in the UK, I was a school governor. You are, however giving these middle class folk who are deep down the rabbit hole an incentive to move to home schooling - or possibly to organise into independent “home school schools”.
Personally, I think compulsion is a poor way to convince people about public health measures. It may not work and is likely to lead to more conspiracy theory- we have to be smarter than that.
Only if it’s done during class unfortunately.
Here in Australia, two of my nutjob ex friends who work for the government and required to get vaccines didn’t.
Oh, and despite not getting them, they’re telling everyone about all the issues they’re causing in the rest of us (who are honestly perfectly healthy, including myself who took Astrozeneca)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At the same time, influencers who gained large followings during the pandemic – including those at the forefront of sowing doubt about the Covid vaccines – appear to have refocused some attention on MMR.
The latest NHS figures show the MMR vaccine uptake is the lowest since 2010-11, with only 84.5% of children having received both doses by age five – well below the WHO recommended rate of 95%.
Part of the problem, said Selvarajah, is that there is a “massive overhang” from the days of Andrew Wakefield, who in the late 1990s pushed the debunked theory that the MMR vaccine causes autism – leading uptake to plummet.
In Hackney, there are particular challenges due to the makeup of the borough, which includes traditionally under-vaccinated groups, such as Orthodox Jewish and Somali communities, as well as a section of the “white middle class” who favour “more organic, holistic living and don’t believe in vaccines”.
Instead, Selvarajah and colleagues are trialling initiatives including holding community talks and paying junior doctors to ring up the parents of unvaccinated children to more gently encourage them to come in.
“Part of the strategy is to be really approachable and easy to access.” Facebook generally permits such discussions, only removing misinformation it thinks is “likely to directly contribute to the risk of imminent physical harm”.
The original article contains 1,167 words, the summary contains 220 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
