It has been more than a year since COVID-19 first hit the world and along with it is another plague that could eradicate humanity from the inside out. Anti-Vaccination Movement started in the 18th century along with the development of the vaccine for smallpox by Edward Jenner in 1796 but the protests heightened in the 19th century following the passage of Great Britain’s Vaccination Act of 1853 which required parents to have their infants vaccinated by 3 months old or face fines.
Opponents would claim that the vaccine did not work and contained poisonous chemicals that made people sick, and mandatory vaccines are likened to authoritarianism by the state and a violation against people’s rights; a claim the past and present anti-vaxxers share (Wolfe & Sharp, 2002). In 1885, almost a century after the first vaccine, Louis Pasteur introduced the rabies vaccine. Then the diphtheria vaccine in the 1930’s, soon after vaccines for pertussis (whooping cough), polio, measles, mumps and rubella were rapidly rolled out.
The year 1988 was a turning point for the anti-vaccination movement. The publication of then gastroenterological surgeon and medical researcher Andrew Wakefield’s report in The Lancet, a prestigious UK based medical journal, linking the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in children with the former being the causative to the latter.
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The vaccine scare caused a significant drop in the vaccination rates in the US and UK thus increasing the cases of Measles (Smith et al., 2008). An article from The Sunday Times by Deer (2006) reported the use of the study for Wakefield’s financial gain. More than two decades after the initial study, on February 2, 2010, the editors of The Lancet finally retracted the study and on May 24, 2010, Wakefield was found guilty by the UK General Medicine Council (GMC) of serious professional misconduct and had his license removed however, the damage has been done and it continues do more since many are still skeptic about the MMR vaccines as shown by the 2017 and 2019 measles outbreak in the US and the loss of the measle eradication status of UK that could easily been preventable had the citizens were vaccinated.
In the present, Sars-Cov-2 holds the same threat as the previous viruses mentioned. Several lives lost and at risk, and rapid infection rates prompted the world into a race towards the most viable solution, a vaccine. Researchers showed an unprecedented speed in developing it but this also attracted many anti-vaxxers to do their own part. As vaccine development continues, the anti-vaccination movement grew along with it. In the present, the anti-vaxxer movement spread their claims through social media as an elaborate organization run by professional propagandists leading multi-million-dollar organizations (Ahmed, 2021). In both the past and the present, the anti-vaccination movement is destructive and needs to be stopped as it promotes misinformation, acts as a catalyst for the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases, and stalls economic growth.
The liberty and leniency of social media guidelines lets the misinformation posted by anti-vaxxers thrive. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (2020), the social media accounts promoting anti-vaxx have a combined audience of 59 million and 5.35 million followers in the UK alone. Additionally, the same organization unveiled what they call the ‘disinformation dozen’ who have the most reach and lead spreading digital misinformation regarding COVID-19 vaccine. Altogether, they produce 73% of content used to campaign anti-vaxx. They include prominent figures, doctors, professionals, health gurus, etc. who easily sway public opinion with their posts.
“Today, anecdote wins over fact. Sensationalist emotional stories have impact.” (Butler, 2016) The intricacies and plans of the most noted Anti-vaxxers to utilize social media in spreading misinformation, recruit more anti-vaxxers and overall, oppose the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was brought to light by the researchers of the Center for Countering Digital Hate in Oct 2020.
Most, if not all the messages about COVID 19 disseminated by anti-vaxxers have the core message that “COVID-19 isn’t dangerous; vaccines are dangerous; you can’t trust doctors or scientists.” (Ahmed, 2021) Furthermore, a study found that social media has an influence in making people believe that vaccinations are not safe. Stating that “the use of social media to organize offline action to be highly predictive of the belief that vaccination is unsafe” (Wilson & Wiysonge, 2020). Anti- vaxxers weaponize fear, anxiety, and obliviousness of people. The use of emotional appeal gives some a sense of belongingness and validation in exchange of their safety and critical thinking.
Now, the formerly eradicated diseases such as measles and polio are coming back due to low vaccination rates. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded 1,282 cases of measles in 31 states from January 1 to December 31, 2019. 89% of whom are unvaccinated or had unknown vaccine status. The 2019 outbreak was the greatest number of cases in the US since 1992 and broke their almost 20 years of elimination status (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019a; 2019b).
The Philippines, too, suffered measles outbreak in 2019 with over 12,700 measles cases and 203 deaths officially reported by DOH. 63% of the total cases have not been vaccinated, 19% have unknown number of doses and 16% have unknown vaccination status (“Questions and Answers on the Measles Outbreak in the Philippines,” 2019). Moreover, the Philippines declared a resurgence of Polio in the country after almost 20 years after it was declared polio free in 2000. This was caused by the lack of confidence and the Dengvaxia scare in 2017.
Research from Larson et al. (2018) showed that there was a significant drop of Filipinos who strongly agreed that vaccines are important from 93% to 32% in 2018. Apart from this, DOH reported in February 2018 that only 60% of the Filipino children got their scheduled vaccine which is lower than the department’s 85% target (Cepeda, 2018). Parents’ and individual’s decisions not to get a vaccine affects everyone as they can disrupt herd immunity against a certain disease. This practice poses a serious threat to the future if the then eradicated viruses resurge and affect unvaccinated children themselves all because their parents believed that the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus itself.
If not yet destructive as it is, the anti-vaccination industry is making a significant impact on the economy too. A research from Ozawa et al. (2017) showed the estimated economic impact of vaccines from the year 2001-2020. Across the 73 countries and 10 vaccine-preventable diseases, an estimated number of 20 million deaths, 500 million cases, 9 million cases of lifelong disability and 960 million DALY’s (Disability-adjusted life years) will be prevented.
Vaccination programs also averted an estimated $350 billion in total costs. However, these numbers might be affected negatively by the rising resistance in immunization programs as Dr Anthony Fauci, the director for the National Institute of allergy and Infectious Diseases said in an interview with CNBC, “If you wind up getting more infections and diseases that were vaccine-preventable, those are entirely avoidable burdens on the economy.
When people get sick, they lose work, they lose their finances from work, [and] they have hospital costs.” A 2013 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention displayed that a person hospitalized with measles can have hospital bills ranging from $4,032 to $46,060. Healthy citizens are key to a stable economic growth. The use of vaccines shows a significant savings by preventing direct and indirect costs such as hospitalizations, medications, and probable long-term disability (Vergara, 2020).
While being initially skeptic about a new vaccine is acceptable, since there are some incidents where there are adverse effects to a licensed vaccine such as the Cutter incident in 1955, where over 250 cases of polio were caused by a vaccine containing live polio virus made by Cutter Laboratories, hence the name and no compensations were given to those who were harmed. Another is in 1976, a small increased risk of getting Guillain-Barré syndrome, a major neurological disorder when vaccinated with the swine flu vaccine.
Approximately, the increase was 1 additional case of Guillain-Barré Syndrome for every 100,000 people vaccinated, then, in 1998, the RotaShield vaccine, the first vaccine to prevent rotavirus, gastroenteritis caused some infants to develop intussusception (Cleveland Clinic: Intussusception is a form of bowel obstruction in which one segment of intestine telescopes inside of another) due to this, RotaShield was voluntarily withdrawn from the market by its manufacturer (Historical Safety Concerns | Vaccine Safety | CDC, 2020).
It is acknowledged and written in history that these cases did cause harm to people, but these failures were properly addressed and it should be noted how rarely this would happen today due to the lessons these incidents brought. Programs such as the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) were made to report and analyze the possibilities of adverse events. Standards were raised too in the present since licensed vaccines go through a series of rigorous tests and trials before getting an approval to be used in the masses and are regularly reassessed after its introduction. The benefits outweigh the risks since people who are not vaccinated are far more probable of getting far more serious injuries from a vaccine-preventable disease rather than a vaccine (Q&A Detail,2020).
“The impact of vaccination on the health of the world’s peoples is hard to exaggerate. With the exception of safe water, no other modality has had such a major effect on mortality reduction and population growth” (Plotkin and Mortimer, 1988). Taking everything with a grain of salt and a little skepticism is a norm, even in well- researched vaccines.
But advocating anti-vaccination, which acts as an industry to spread misinformation, causing formerly eradicated or nearly eliminated vaccine- preventable diseases to reappear and affecting the economy negatively is unjust and should be held accountable. Social media companies and governments must work hand-in-hand to hold the responsible figures and prevent further damage the anti-vaccination movement could bring. While campaigning for more transparent, accessible, and comprehensible websites and accounts to combat the misinformation pervading the internet, we should also acknowledge the importance of educating the masses and poverty-stricken areas.
Prioritizing the masses and highly-affected individuals with accessible vaccine rollouts would, too, make a difference and there would be no more room for misinformation to grow. “The problem has never been ability; instead, it has been the will to act.” (Ahmed 2021). Different variables and uncertainties affect the dynamics of the world and humanity however, if people choose to focus and act, the world could combat the plague of Anti-Vaccination
