- Scientists say some deaths will occur during the COVID-19 vaccination rollout, but these deaths would have happened for other reasons and are unrelated to the vaccine.
- The newness of the virus and uncertainty about COVID-19 make people more susceptible to misinformation, experts say.
- People can implement strategies, including research and corroboration, to ensure the information they’re reading about the COVID-19 vaccines is credible.
Vaccine-hesitant groups are peddling misinformation and conspiracy theories aimed at eroding trust in the COVID-19 vaccine and the public health systems that are disseminating them.
In the latest attempts to undermine the vaccination rollout, activists are exploiting the deaths of those who died of old age or underlying health conditions after receiving the shot.
In some instances, vaccine-hesitant activists are manufacturing stories of deaths related to the vaccine that never happened.
These groups are also latching onto reports of real deaths following the shot, blaming the vaccine and disregarding medical information that other causes are to blame.
“The vaccine has been disproportionately given to the population that is disproportionately dying,” said Dr. Jill Foster, a pediatric infectious disease physician with the University of Minnesota Medical School and M Health Fairview, who studies vaccine misinformation.
“Older people in nursing homes are being prioritized for the vaccine because they’re the ones that are dying at the highest rates from COVID,” Foster said. “But when you think of a population that is mainly over the age of 75 and debilitated already because they’re in a nursing home, that’s a group of people who are dying at a higher rate already.”
Ignoring that important context is a strategy vaccine-hesitant groups have been using for years, said Kolina Koltai, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow and misinformation researcher at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.
“This is the difficult part because most people think misinformation just means something is fake, but there are a lot ways that misinformation can take shape,” she told Healthline.
“On the surface, a lot of anti-vaccine misinformation can be very convincing because they [activists] can take a quote or a bit of misinformation and isolate it, focusing on just that bit and removing all the other context,” Koltai added.
She cited the example of a Facebook post that was shared by many vaccine-hesitant advocates that included a quote from Dr. Kelly Moore, deputy director of the Immunization Action Coalition.
The meme included a photo of an ill, older adult with Moore’s statement: “One of the things we want to make sure people understand is that they should not be unnecessarily alarmed if there are reports, once we start vaccinating, of someone or multiple people dying within a day or two of their vaccination who are residents of a long-term care facility.”
But there was more to Moore’s statement that the meme left out, Reuters reported. She went on to say, “That would be something we would expect, as a normal occurrence, because people die frequently in nursing homes.”
The additional context clarifies that Moore is saying deaths in nursing homes that have nothing to do with the vaccine should be expected.
“It’s misaligning the narrative, and that’s a misinformation tactic that’s tricky because the quote itself is true, but the meaning of the quote has been totally changed,” Koltai explained.
Source: healthline