Analysis: Growing Online Anti-Vaccine Movement Is Threat to Brazil’s Public Health

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Over the past few years, Brazil has perceived a drop in vaccine coverage of the basic immunization calendar. Last year, none of the basic vaccines reached their target for the first time. Experts point out that there are several reasons for this. One of them is the spread of misinformation by the anti-vaccine movement – and it has been gaining ground in the country.

Evidence of this is that 75 percent of people said in the latest Datafolha survey in October that they would like to be vaccinated against Covid-19. In other words, one in four Brazilians does not know if they will or will not want to be immunized. In August, the rate pointing out that they wanted to be vaccinated had stood at 89 percent.

Through internet channels, videos use arguments that raise doubts about the safety of vaccines, as well as questions about other “natural methods” that would prevent diseases.

A survey released on Monday, October 26th, shows that YouTube channels help to convey this false information. The study was conducted by researchers at Unicamp (Campinas State University) and the US California University (Berkley), published in Frontiers in Communication magazine.

In the study, they found 158 videos about vaccines with over ten thousand views, interactions, and links to other videos on the network. The research was conducted between February and March, that is, before the debates around the Covid-19 vaccine.

Eight of the 20 channels spreading this false information bear the Verified Account badge by YouTube and belong to companies or promoters of alternative health services.

In the material reported, three arguments stand out: that the vaccines contain dangerous ingredients (present in 53 percent of samples), the advocacy of freedom of choice (48 percent), the promotion of alternative health services (in 42 percent).

Negative influence

According to Dayane Machado, Ph.D. student at the Unicamp Scientific and Technological Policy Department and one of the study’s authors, there is no specific research that correlates the causality between the spread of misinformation and the drop in vaccine coverage in Brazil.

“What we have is research showing that excessive exposure to misinformation and various conspiracy theories can influence people’s decision making, including whether or not to be vaccinated or to adopt an alternative vaccination calendar,” she explains.

The doctoral student explains that one must differentiate between the anti-vaccination movement and hesitation to be vaccinated. “Imagine that there is a long ruler. At one end are those who openly advocate for vaccination and have no problem with it. At the other end, we position the anti-vaccination movements. Between these two points, there are several positions that we call vaccine hesitation. People who are hesitant about vaccines may be those who refuse some vaccines but take others; people who defer the vaccination calendar; and even people who obey the calendar but don’t feel safe,” she explains.

Machado also claims that an anti-vaccination movement is only considered as such when someone produces and spreads misinformation about vaccines for a given motive.

Thus, this anti-vaccine movement not only seeks strategies to spread misinformation further, but also produces misinformation as a method to make people suspicious or afraid of vaccines. Particularly in the American movement, there are well-known figures who live off this ‘activism’. They earn a fee to give a lecture, hold events, feed ‘fan clubs’, sell books, teach courses…

Collective risk

But to quit vaccinating oneself or one’s children does not produce only an isolated result, as many people wrongly think. “Vaccination is not an individual decision that you can make and that will have no consequences for society. Vaccination is about collective health,” explains Natália Pasternak, Ph.D. in microbiology and president of the Questão de Ciência Institute.

“When you cease to be vaccinated, you stop producing herd immunity, which is what protects vulnerable people. When a good part of a population is vaccinated, the disease stops spreading, and then those who for some reason cannot get vaccinated – either because they are immuno-compromised or because they are very small babies – are (indirectly) protected. This is how the disease has no way of reaching vulnerable people,” she adds.

For Pasternak, there is a worrying growth of this anti-vaccine feeling in Brazil. “It comes from a movement that is very much influenced by the natural movement, from natural cures, from a chemistry-free life – as if this were possible. It is an appeal that everything that is natural is better, and since vaccines are not natural, they are bad. This is combined with another of this movement’s appeals that if you lead a healthy life, a healthy diet, you don’t need vaccines, your immune system can handle it,” she explains.

According to her, the situation has become even more serious. “During the pandemic, this situation worsens greatly when you have misinformation directly from the President of the country,” she adds.

Diseases returning

Guido Levi, director of SBIm (Brazilian Society of Immunization), says that discussing the significance and safety of vaccines is something completely out of place these days.

“They are our main public health strategy. Vaccines have increased the life expectancy of the population in the past two centuries by 30 years,” he says, mentioning the eradication of diseases such as smallpox and polio.

However, he says that professionals in the area have noted a “very significant growth” in misinformation and warns that this has already had repercussions in society, such as the return of measles.

“Studies have already been done in several countries: if you go on the Internet and look there will be many more websites against vaccines than in favor, with appropriate technical and scientific information,” he says, advocating a national mobilization.

“That is why it is very important that we, professionals, work hard, 24 hours a day, providing information with clear scientific data and safe sources on the efficacy, significance, and safety of vaccines. Most of these fake news are very easily refuted with scientific data,” he adds.

He also blames the misinformation and the consequent drop in vaccination coverage on the historical success of immunizations. “One of the most important factors was the elimination of diseases, which makes people neglect the importance of vaccines. You get younger doctors, they have never seen a case of polio, of congenital measles. In the past we saw these diseases. In the Red Cross in São Paulo, the wards were filled with measles; everyone knew someone with polio,” he says.

Levi also comments on the Datafolha polls in state capitals showing that between 15 and 20 percent of people, depending on the city, do not intend to be immunized against Covid-19. If this is confirmed, controlling the epidemic will be a serious problem, says the director of SBIm.

“For Covid-19 we need a very high vaccination rate to achieve immunity, otherwise we will not get rid of it”, he warns, but he is optimistic. “In my opinion, once the vaccine is available, you won’t have 20 percent that won’t take it. I am certain there will be a change in this respect.”