When it comes to believing medical experts that our children should be vaccinated, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the world has a trust problem. A 2018 survey showed that only 72 per cent of North Americans “somewhat” or “strongly” believe that vaccines are safe, and last year, for the first time ever, the World Health Organization named vaccine hesitancy a threat to global health.
Parents’ reasoning for why they refuse to vaccinate their children is complex: one of the most common arguments is that vaccines increase the risk of autism in children, a misconception that began in 1998 when a (now-discredited) study was published in the Lancet medical journal. The study, conducted by former gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield (who was later erased from the U.K. medical register following allegations of professional misconduct), claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine caused behavioural regression and autism in children. Other anti-vax reasoning involves fear about the ingredients present in certain vaccines, which can include ethylmercury, aluminum, and formaldehyde, though that too is based on a misunderstanding of the absolutely miniscule amounts that are used.
However, there’s a case to be made that the anti-vaccination epidemic isn’t the root of the problem facing our society today. Rather, it’s a symptom of a greater disease: the decline of our trust in experts, and the rise of conspiracy thinking in popular culture.
Those who distrust authority often create alternative narratives to explain events: some are harmless (if a little infuriating), such as flat-Earthers and moon-landing deniers, while others have proven to have graver and more far-reaching consequences, such as those who believe school shootings such as Sandy Hook were staged, and have harassed grieving parents and accused children involved of being “crisis actors.”
Sadly, the anti-vax movement leans closer to the dangerous end of this spectrum, putting children whose only crime was being born into the wrong family at risk of potentially life-altering and fatal diseases. According to the United States Center for Disease Control, last year saw 1,282 cases of measles in the United States — the greatest number since 1992, and the majority of cases occurred in individuals who were not vaccinated.
So just why exactly is this happening?
The digital age we’re living in likely has something to do with it. The 21st century is the era of unprecedented access to information; the internet has revolutionized the way we learn, work, and communicate, and given billions of people access to a network of nearly limitless data, ideas, and media. But with access to such a wide number of information sources, it is only becoming harder to determine what should be believed, and what is misleading (or altogether fabricated). The phenomena of clickbait and so-called “fake news” has been a topic of much discussion in recent years, and despite numerous efforts by social media platforms and other tech companies to limit the spread of misinformation, they have remained a persistent concern.
Worse still, malicious actors have seized on the internet’s ability to mislead the masses, using it as an opportunity to deliberately misinform us — sometimes merely for cynical amusement, but often in order to further specific agendas (such as Russia’s meddling in the United States’s presidential elections). A 2016 poll conducted by Buzzfeed News found that an alarming 75 per cent of American adults admitted to having fallen for fake news during the 2016 election cycle, and similar polling conducted in Canada shows that we aren’t far behind.
Poor journalism hasn’t done the public’s trust in experts any favours either; immensely popular websites with slickly-edited videos and clickbait headlines such as “IFL Science” often make misleading and bombastic declarations about science, only for it to later turn out that the underlying studies came to conclusions that were nowhere near as explosive as online media suggests.
And although the internet has almost certainly made matters worse, this isn’t just a recent trend — alarmist reporting that treats conjecture as fact has been going on for decades now, and is at least partly to blame for other public opinion crises, such as climate change denial. It is frequently argued by deniers that because journalists and scientists in the 1970s and ‘80s erroneously predicted “global cooling,” science as a whole should not be trusted (even though those views were broadly denounced by scientists, even at the time).
The claims made by groups such as flat-Earthers and anti-vaxxers follow very similar logic, and it is hard to believe that the growing prominence of both groups in recent years is a coincidence. YouTube in particular has come under fire for having a recommendation engine that regularly propagates conspiracy-theorist materials, and in at least one case was found to be recommending anti-vax videos to users viewing pro-vaccination content.
In all of this chaos, however, there is a beacon of hope. Recent data from Pew Research Center suggests that public confidence in scientists ***is slowly going up, with surveys last year showing that since 2016, there has been an increase in Americans’ beliefs that scientists act in the public interest (although 14 per cent of adults still remain unconvinced). This finding may suggest that the efforts of journalists and platform-holders to stem the flow of disinformation have been at least partially successful, but the battle is still far from over, and the fight can’t be theirs alone. There is no sure-fire way for any of us to avoid fake news completely, but it falls on each of us to do our part to mitigate the spread of misleading and false information when we can. If we make the effort to call out misleading stories and videos when we see them, click on the citations in the articles we read rather than taking the author’s word for it, and encourage others to do the same, we can continue to push back against misinformation. It isn’t much, but if humanity is going to figure our way out of this era of political turmoil, information overload, and existential threats, defending truth really is the only chance we’ve got.
Illustration: Kayt Hine/The Cascade
