Covid 19

Yes, I DO say, because the PROOF of the result of all of this MONETIZED online content is around me. Some of my neighbors, who we used to “shoot the breeze” with over nothing much except maybe the “weather”, or “how tall the grass was growing”, are now so jacked up and angry about everything that you can’t hardly talk to them anymore about normal, everyday things. And the only difference that I can see is that in the last few years, they’ve been reading all that MONETIZED, online content that has provoked these kinds of strong emotions in them. I can tell because sometimes they’ll mention a “word”, or a “story” that I’m unfamiliar with, and I’ll go online and search for it, and “Bingo!”, it turns out that’s where they got it from - MONETIZED ONLINE CONTENT!

 

Don't forget, the Obama birther stuff/Trump's rise from it/2016 election interference is Russian ops. Step back and look at the big picture. It's not complicated. Russia survives and Putin thrives when Western Democracy isn't up his ass all the time. Very simple. When people argue angrily about how wrong you are about Trump and Russia and COVID ad masks and anything else, you then realize just how deep and manifold the Russian propaganda arm's tentacles are, and have spread - all while China gets stronger and sinks its claws into central America with ease, since 40% of our population is too distracted and zombie-fied by Youtube/FB videos that they can't understand are meant to do exactly what they are doing, which is to turn them into free proxies doing the work of Russia to weaken the #1 threat to Putin, which is strong Western democracy.

 

More like the neighbors realized who you really are.

 

You have to forgive Buzz as he seems to have never been that good at reading and even less so at comprehension.

 

I think what’s most concerning here is that if we ever get a brand new, communicable disease down the road, unrelated to Covid. During this pandemic, a precedent has been set by what should have been viewed as a public health issue, like we had always done in the past, but instead became a divisive and polarizing issue that became financially exploited, mainly by online profiteers, who do not have our best interests at heart. So, if a new disease ever comes onto the scene, will the same thing happen again? Will the “new normal” consist of being bombarded by online disinformation campaigns which seek profit, and take advantage of those who are unable to navigate the minefield of monetized disinformation? Is this what we can expect to be our future?

 

Oh, so now just expecting to have a pleasant conversation with a neighbor, like I had in the past, without having to listen to them pitch a MAJOR CONNIPTION FIT over monetized junk they’ve read online is now somehow “wrong” too? I will NOT encourage those angry emotions when I am standing outside with them on a perfectly beautiful, summer day, and they have FAILED to notice that God has given them that day, and yet they have chosen to squander it in anger and resentment, and all because of some MONETIZED junk they have read online. Somebody’s laughing all the way to the bank, and it’s sure not them! Floyd Roseberry, that Capitol bomber from North Carolina, could have been one of my neighbors. He talks wildly out of control, is angry, and is a victim of monetized online content. Even his own son and pastor don’t seem to recognize him anymore:

The sad thing is, he could have taken his son fishing that day, instead of going to the Capitol, but he didn’t because he allowed himself to be manipulated by monetized, online content, which was the source that CREATED and FED his resentments, and now he’s facing federal charges. He’s lucky he wasn’t killed.

 

This level of opposition in this county:

https://twitter.com/girlsreallyrule/status/1425779523682029568



Amee Vanderpool

@girlsreallyrule

Anti-mask parents in Franklin, TN, harassed and threatened medical professionals and other parents wearing masks outside a Williamson County school board meeting on Tuesday night, after a mask mandate was approved. CPS needs to investigate these parents.



From
Matt Masters
7:21 AM · Aug 12, 2021



Leads to this:




Rick Wimberly

@RickWimberly

Fairview Middle to be closed tomorrow because of COVID cases (187 of 560 students, 23 of 77 faculty). We'll have to use one of ten weather days for them and no remote learning can be offered because of new State requirements. #WCSedu

7:33 PM · Aug 19, 2021

 

https://www.abqjournal.com/2421306/dan-patrick-blames-unvaccinated-black-people-for-covid-surge.html

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s COVID claim denounced as racist

BY ACACIA CORONADO / REPORT FOR AMERICA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: Friday, August 20th, 2021 at 2:54pm
Updated: Friday, August 20th, 2021 at 4:25pm

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas’ lieutenant governor blamed rising hospitalization and death rates from COVID-19 on unvaccinated Black people — comments that were quickly denounced as racist.

Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick made the remarks Thursday night on a Fox News segment in response to question about the latest coronavirus surge in Texas. The state is seeing its highest hospitalization rates since January as the highly contagious delta variant spreads.

“The biggest group in most states are African Americans who have not been vaccinated,” Patrick said.

Patrick did not change course Friday, saying “Democrat social media trolls” misstated facts and that he had used state data in his assertions. His office did not respond to a request for additional comments.

But statistics from the Texas Department of State Health Services don’t back that. Black people — who make up about 12% of the more than 29 million people in Texas — accounted for about 15% of total COVID-19 cases and just more than 10% of deaths.

Patrick also told Fox News that Democrats were to blame for low vaccination rates among Black people, who frequently support that party, even though he believes Republicans should persuade more people to get their shots, too. But he also tiptoed around that issue, which has been sensitive for the GOP.

“But we respect the fact that if people don’t want the vaccination, we’re not going to force it on them,” Patrick said. “That’s their individual right.”

City and county officials in Texas — many of whom are are in ongoing legal battles with state government over mask mandates — met Patrick with swift rebukes.

“The Lt. Governor’s statements are offensive and should not be ignored,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who is Black, said on Twitter.

Rodney Ellis, a Black commissioner for the county that encompasses Houston, tweeted that Patrick’s comments were “racist and flat out wrong.”

“It’s disappointing that the Lt. Governor would rather scapegoat Black people than do the right thing and work with local government to help control the spread of COVID-19,” Ellis wrote.

About 8% of the eligible Black population in Texas has been vaccinated against COVID-19, according to state data, compared with 35% of the white population. White people make up the largest racial group in Texas at about 40% of the total residents.

Overall, 44% of Texans are fully vaccinated, less than the national rate of about 50%. COVID-19 is blamed for more than 50,000 deaths in the state, and more than 600,000 across the U.S.

Failures and abuses on behalf of government — including the “Tuskegee syphilis study,” in which unsuspecting Black men were used as guinea pigs in a study of a sexually transmitted disease — have led to mistrust in public institutions for many African Americans.

Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas State NAACP Conference, said those historic disparities combined with the politicization of vaccines, misinformation and access to shots is the problem. Bledsoe said he was “shocked” by Patrick’s comments.

“I am so concerned that he is going to give field to somebody to go out there and do something outrageous because they think someone in their community got infected by Black people. That is just not true,” Bledsoe said. “Reach out beyond your political base, reach out to people of all the political persuasions in Texas, all the races and religions, and say, ‘Let’s come together,’ because this is a major problem.”

The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from COVID-19 in Texas has risen over the past two weeks from 50.29 deaths per day on Aug. 4 to 115.14 deaths per day on Aug. 18, according to data from Johns Hopkins University Center.

This is not the first time that Patrick has been criticized for comments related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In an April 2020 appearance on Fox News, Patrick said the U.S. should get back to work in the face of the pandemic and that people over the age of 70, who the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says are at higher risk for severe illness from the coronavirus, will “take care of ourselves.”

 

These are the same folks that complain about unapproved vaccines they do not know what contents may be included?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mississippi-poison-calls-soar-vaccine-035845930.html

Mississippi Poison Calls Soar As Vaccine Skeptics Turn To Livestock Drug For COVID-19
Mary Papenfuss
Fri, August 20, 2021, 11:58 PM·3 min read

Mississippi health officials are pleading with state residents not to take a livestock drug to treat COVID-19 as calls to poison control centers soar.

Fearful Mississipians skeptical of the safety of vaccinations are shockingly turning instead to swallowing ivermectin — generally used to eradicate or prevent parasites in livestock.

“Do not use ivermectin products made for animals,” Mississippi’s Health Department flatly stated in a Facebook post Friday. “Animal doses are not safe for humans.”

“I think some people are trying to use it as a [COVID-19] preventative, which I think is really kind of crazy, so please don’t do that,” Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said at a press briefing Wednesday. (See the video up top.)

“You wouldn’t get your chemotherapy at a feed store. You wouldn’t treat your pneumonia with your animal’s medication,” he added. “It can be dangerous to get the wrong doses of medication, especially for something that’s meant for a horse or a cow. It’s really important, if people have medical needs, go through your physician or provider.”

Officials also issued an alert Friday to health care providers in the state concerning the increase in poison control calls due to possible ivermectin toxicity.

“At least 70% of the recent calls have been related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers,” noted the alert.

Ivermectin can be deadly in large doses. Most callers to Mississippi’s poison control center had mild symptoms, though one caller was advised to seek further care “due to the amount of ivermectin reportedly ingested,” according to the alert.

At least one person in the state was hospitalized because of ivermectin toxicity, the Mississippi Free Press reported.

Though ivermectin is commonly used to treat or prevent parasites in livestock, far smaller dose tablets have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat conditions caused by parasitic worms in people. Topical forms are approved to treat human conditions such as head lice and rosacea. But doses are vastly decreased from what might be used for a cow, for example.

The drug is not approved to treat or prevent COVID-19. Using any drugs not approved by the FDA to treat COVID-19 can “cause serious harm,” the agency warned.

The FDA issued it own warning against ivermectin use earlier this year after the agency noted “multiple reports of patients who have required medical support and been hospitalized after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses.”

The high doses of ivermectin products for animals “can be highly toxic in humans,” the FDA added. Versions of the drug approved for humans could also interact with other medications, and people could overdose and potentially die, the agency warned.

Mississippi currently has the highest rate of COVID-19 cases in the nation and is tied for the worst vaccination rate, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 20,000 students in the state were quarantined the first week of school amid soaring cases of the delta variant of COVID-19.

 

This is yet another sad instance in which MONETIZED online disinformation has exploited and fleeced the American public. Disinformation, made to look like legitimate medical “reports” are duping thousands, as they rush to buy ivermectin, a veterinary drug, mainly used to treat worms. Expect to see more of this happening in the country where manipulated emotions can be channeled towards products and questionable treatments. Advertising has been using the same tactics for decades, but the proliferation of online content presents us with an entirely new form of persuasion. In its minor form, online, monetized disinformation, will merely act as an “electronic pickpocket”, selling useless products and “treatments” to the gullible and fearful, but in its worst form, it can manipulate your emotions and change your perceptions enough to threaten your mental health - just like that angry fellow who showed up at the Capitol. And like everything in this country during this era of grifters and charlatans, you must protect yourself because NO ONE is looking out for you, or your family!

 

I am thinking maybe we need to change it from Covid-19 to the Darwin awards. Taking the stupid out of the gene pool

 

https://www.minnpost.com/community-...er-with-unvaccinated-america-at-the-hospital/

On an encounter with Unvaccinated America at the hospital


I asked if they decided the prep their sister was undergoing for a very invasive ventilator was worth their anti-vaccination position.

By Mary Stanik
Aug. 20, 2021


News that the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is swamping hospitals nationwide has made me think of some of the difficult days I spent in a hospital as a University of Minnesota medical center spokesperson.

And until I became my mother’s caregiver when she had a stroke in June 2014, I was able to avoid hospitals, save for visiting healthy friends and their newborns.

After five years of stable health, my mother embarked on a serious decline after my brother’s May 2019 death. Earlier this month, she was in emergency for the first time since her stroke. On her second visit the other week, and after my remaining brother and I learned she has advanced congestive heart failure and we subsequently decided to put her into hospice, I got up close and personal with this variant. Or, as many would put it, my encounter was with Unvaccinated America. An America also, as it were, calling for health care rationing.

While letting my brother take a turn with my mother in emergency, I sat outside the hospital on a very early morning, looking to the nearby Catalina Foothills for reassurance from family gone to the other side that I was doing the right thing. A couple who appeared to be in their late 30s sat at a distance from me and asked if I was with “the really elderly lady” they saw being wheeled into one of the department’s private rooms. I said they probably were speaking about my mother. I expected to hear a perfunctory “sorry to hear your mom is sick” sort of response. Oh no.

I soon was subjected to something between a diatribe and a cri de coeur about their presence at the hospital, that being because the man’s sister was in with a very serious case of COVID-19. And that her illness shouldn’t have happened at all because she was healthier “than most fat Americans, because she is a competitive athlete.” They added that she shouldn’t have needed any vaccines because vaccines (allegedly) are tools of Big Corporate Healthcare, and that “if someone we could believe had only told us” the virus could sicken “really athletic people like us,” well, they could have tried homeopathy. I thought for a few seconds about the piece I did for MinnPost in January about no longer engaging in arguments with those for whom reason is confused with season. But I was tired and distraught and I entered the joust. After all, I am an opinion writer and a former high school debater.

I started by telling them my mother and I had been fully vaccinated and that my mother was not in the hospital because of the coronavirus. Then I explained I was no genius but that it seemed clear they believed enough in hospitals and conventional medicine to entrust their sister’s life to such care. And then I asked if they decided the prep their sister was undergoing for a very invasive ventilator was worth their anti-vaccination position. The woman said, “Well, I guess we’re going to have to get vaccinated now. But we still don’t believe in it.” The man then asked if I felt “justified” in having my mother take up “valuable medical resources” when “people like my sister who have more of a right to live are in the hospital.”

Now, some might think I would have been livid at this impertinence. But I wasn’t. Not entirely. I don’t know if it’s because I’m of a certain age or because I witnessed so many questions of appropriate medical resource use come into play when I was at the university that I kept most of my powder dry. I told them in as Rod Serling-calm of a voice as I could that I didn’t disagree with their position about wise use of medical care that is certain to become even more scarce as this variant and others spike their way throughout the nation.

I told them the only reason my mother was in the hospital was because hospice had not yet delivered the equipment needed to keep her out of hospital and that I brought her there because, while I know her time here is likely not long, I didn’t want her to die while choking for breath. I told them that once she was stabilized later that day, I’d be taking her home. I also said their sister’s medical resource-intensive hospitalization was, to be blunt, almost certainly avoidable. Then I thought about how many other similar discussions might be going on outside hospitals at that very moment, given reports about non-urgent treatments and surgeries being postponed due to the variant’s surge.

The man glared at me awhile and said, “You might be right. We’re just angry. Life isn’t supposed to be this hard.”

I wanted to say, well, welcome to reality, young one. But I only wished their sister well and said that most of us don’t get out of this life without experiencing difficulty.

Still, I worry about how many encounters such as the one I had might take far more sinister turns should viral matters become more deadly. And how long any measure of peace might hold between the two Americas of vaccinated and not.

 

U.S. FDA
@US_FDA

You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it.



Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19
Using the Drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19 can be dangerous and even lethal. The FDA has not approved the drug for that purpose.
fda.gov
7:57 AM · Aug 21, 2021

 

This anti-vaxx fellow showed up at a Springfield, Missouri Walmart in an agitated emotional state, repeating an online conspiracy theory about the vaccine, while also threatening Walmart employees. Of course, he had to live-stream himself on FaceBook to create his own online content! Later, when the police showed up, he said that he was just “waiting for a vaccine”, but then threatened to sue Walmart for vaccinating people.



Spreading Online Disinformation, Deliberately Provoking, and Recording the Manufactured “Event” which will later be posted, on his own online, MONETIZED site.

 

Anti-vax is big business:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/18/ppp-loans-anti-vaccine/

The Trump administration bailed out prominent anti-vaccine groups during a pandemic
Five groups received more than $850,000 in PPP loans to help small businesses through the pandemic

By
Elizabeth Dwoskin
and
Aaron Gregg

January 18, 2021 at 9:44 a.m. EST

Five prominent anti-vaccine organizations that have been known to spread misleading information about the coronavirus received more than $850,000 in loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, raising questions about why the government is giving money to groups actively opposing its agenda and seeking to undermine public health during a critical period.

The groups that received the loans are the National Vaccine Information Center, Mercola Health Resources, the Informed Consent Action Network, the Children’s Health Defense and the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy group based in the United Kingdom that fights misinformation and conducted the research using public documents. The group relied on data released in early December by the Small Business Administration in response to a lawsuit from The Washington Post and other news organizations.

Several of the Facebook pages of these organizations have been penalized by the social network, including being prohibited from buying advertising, for pushing misinformation about the coronavirus.

Vaccines are largely considered safe and effective, and clinical trials for those made by Moderna and Pfizer did not raise serious safety concerns. But many Americans hold skeptical attitudes about vaccination, attitudes that public health experts have said are attributable in part to misinformation. Nearly 40 percent of Americans say they definitely or probably would not get a coronavirus vaccine, according to a December survey by the Pew Research Center. Certain groups, including Republicans and Black Americans, are even more skeptical, Pew found.

Public health officials, including World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, have called vaccine misinformation “a major threat to global health that could reverse decades of progress made in tackling preventable diseases,” and last year the organization partnered with Facebook to help counter misinformation on its platform with content from authoritative sources.

The smallest loan, $72,000, went to the Tenpenny organization, which is run by Sherri Tenpenny, an osteopathic physician and social media figure who uses online forums to promote alternative health and argue against vaccinations for children and others. A popular page run by Tenpenny was banned from Facebook in December for spreading misinformation, although she still has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram.

The largest loan, $335,000, went to Mercola, an organization affiliated with Joseph Mercola, a well-known anti-vaccine activist and businessman. The left-leaning human rights group Avaaz deemed one of Mercola’s groups on Facebook one of the leading “superspreaders” of misinformation about the coronavirus. His Facebook pages in English and Spanish together have more than 2.7 million followers.

The Children’s Health Defense Co., founded by Robert Kennedy Jr., said it does not oppose vaccines, but is dedicated to questioning their safety. The group has questioned whether the coronavirus vaccines that have received emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration are safe, as well as whether children should be vaccinated.

The group has posted on its social media channels about the “great reset” conspiracy theory, which holds that “global elites” such as Bill Gates will use the pandemic to advance their interests and push forward a globalist or Marxist plot to destroy American sovereignty and prosperity and control the population. In a CNBC interview in October, Gates said that it was “unfortunate” that he and Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had been targeted by conspiracy theorists, and that he worried that falsehoods and misleading information about the virus were undermining the country’s ability to respond to the pandemic.

Organizations linked to Kennedy were responsible for the majority of Facebook advertising that was critical of vaccinations, until Facebook restricted the group’s ability to advertise in 2019 on the grounds that it spread misinformation, according to a study in the journal Vaccine. Facebook also has removed the group from its recommendation algorithms so that it is not suggested to other users as a potential interest, and has demoted it in its News Feed so that it shows up on people’s Facebook pages less frequently, and has blocked the ability of users to “like” the page.

In 2020, the group sued Facebook and its fact-checking partners over the ad ban and over debunking the group’s posts with fact-checking labels, costing the group 95 percent of its website traffic from Facebook, according to the lawsuit.

In an interview, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, said his organization is “scrupulous about obeying the law” and questioned whether there is any law or regulation that would prevent his organization from receiving federal help.

“I’ve never heard anybody say that a loan is only available to people who don’t question the government,” Kennedy said.

The four other PPP recipients described in this article did not respond to requests for comment.

The anti-vaccine groups are ramping up their tactics and messaging at a moment when more and more Americans are searching for accurate information about coronavirus vaccines. Encouraging the safe use of vaccines is considered a vital component of the government’s efforts to alleviate the public health crisis.

 

The Center for Countering Digital Hate previously exposed a conference in which anti-vaccination activists planned to seize upon people’s doubts and fears to undermine confidence in coronavirus vaccines.

“Lending money to these organizations so they can prosper is a sickening use of taxpayer money. These groups are actively working to undermine the national covid vaccination drive, which will create long-term health problems that are felt most acutely in minority communities and low-income neighborhoods,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Although it’s unclear whether the anti-vaccine groups broke any rules, its receipt of public assistance is in many ways a consequence of the scattershot way in which the Paycheck Protection Program delivered hundreds of billions of dollars with few guardrails or preconditions.

The program was built on a controversial decision to allow businesses to self-certify their eligibility for a taxpayer-backed loan. The SBA does not hand out the loans itself; rather, it empowers a network of approved lenders to quickly process them on its behalf.

Although the SBA reserves the right to audit specific PPP loans, the government performed almost no vetting of specific loan recipients beyond a basic check to determine whether the applicant had already received a loan.

The self-certification policy allowed the government to quickly pump money into a struggling business community during the chaotic months of April and May, by cutting much of the red tape typically associated with loan approvals.

But the broad eligibility criteria and lack of vetting meant that numerous questionably deserving organizations were among the millions of loan recipients. Massive restaurant and hotel chains such as Shake Shack and Sonic benefited handsomely from loans to their affiliates. Debt collectors and high-interest lenders pocketed more than $500 million. A defense contractor with billions in sales received one.

In some cases, the government has tried to claw back money after media outlets highlighted certain recipients. In April, it asked publicly traded companies to return money, and it later accused local Planned Parenthood affiliates of improperly accessing PPP loans.

It’s unclear whether the SBA will take issue with anti-vaccination groups receiving PPP funding.

Carol Wilkerson, a spokeswoman for the SBA, declined to comment on whether the anti-vaccine organizations were legally eligible for the loans they received. She added that the agency is reviewing loan forgiveness applications to ensure compliance with the rules, and that the next round of PPP funding will include more vetting on the front end before an organization receives a loan.

She suggested that the organizations in question probably did meet the requirements; the PPP program was open to a wide range of businesses and nonprofit groups.

“In general, if PPP applicants [or] borrowers met the requirements, they got a loan,” Wilkerson said.

The SBA has previously said in informational materials that a business appearing in its PPP loan database “doesn’t mean that SBA has made an affirmative declaration that a borrower is eligible.”

Misinformation about the coronavirus has spread widely across social media throughout the pandemic, shared by everyday people as well as anti-vaccine activists and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Now, some of those groups have turned their attention to the vaccines, making baseless arguments, for example, that the U.S. government will force people to receive the shots, that they contain microchips and that recipients will be compelled to wear some biological marker to prove that they had the vaccine.

The social media pages of the anti-vaccine groups point to articles and research highlighting stories of adverse effects of the coronavirus vaccines, or warning against forced vaccinations and passports, or the dangers of masks. Many of the posts are factual, but use fearmongering or present a distorted picture of the dangers of vaccines.

Facebook has banned misinformation about the coronavirus and the vaccines, and has cracked down on large Facebook groups that oppose or question vaccination, including four of the five groups that received the PPP loans, spokeswoman Dani Lever said.

In recent months, the company also suspended two major groups, including the 100,000-plus-member Stop Mandatory Vaccination, as well as pages belonging to several of the movement’s leading figures. The National Vaccine Information Center is also prohibited from advertising, and the Informed Consent Action Network’s page has been labeled with a link to the World Health Organization and is not being recommended to users by the company’s algorithms, Lever said.

The company did not ban the groups for misinformation, but for what it said was spammy and abusive behavior, such as using paid troll farms in Macedonia and the Philippines to spread messages.

Despite Facebook’s actions, major anti-vaccine accounts on social media platforms have gained more than 10 million followers since 2019, including 4 million additional followers on Instagram and 1 million on Facebook, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

“These organizations have been sowing the seeds of doubt about vaccines and public health for years,” said Erica DeWald, advocacy director at Vaccinate Your Family, a nonprofit pro-vaccine organization.

“Now, in the middle of a pandemic, they are accepting funds for the chaos they’ve helped to create,” she said.

 

https://inews.co.uk/news/technology...-19-coronavirus-vaccine-misinformation-803099

Anti-vaxxers ‘aim to indoctrinate vaccine-hesitant ethnic minorities and parents’ on private Facebook groups
Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook and across social media are targeting ethnic minorities and parents who are unsure about vaccines, a report has claimed

By Rhiannon Williams
Technology Correspondent
December 22, 2020 12:01 am(Updated December 23, 2020 9:25 am)
Anti-vaxxers are using private Facebook groups to train members in converting the ‘vaccine-hesitant’ into anti-vaccine activists, convincing others that the danger lies in the vaccine itself rather than Covid-19.

A report from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has found that anti-vaxxers are paying special attention to targeting ethnic minorities and parents, capitalising on conspiracy theories and trying to spread fear and uncertainty over vaccine safety.

Some anti-vaxxers have claimed the virus does not affect minorities, despite mounting evidence that people from Black, Asian and ethnic minorities are disproportionately more likely to die from it, and have stoked mistrust by linking vaccine advocates to historical and structural racism.

Parents’ responsibility over vaccinating their children makes them effective messagers for anti-vaxxers, who circulate theories in groups that children could suffer lifelong illnesses or die after receiving the vaccine.

Speakers at a private conference held by anti-vaccine non-profit the National Vaccine Information Centre (NVIC) in October hailed the coronavirus outbreak as a historic opportunity to “popularise anti-vaccine sentiment,” the CCDH claimed.

Three-pronged narrative
Online anti-vaxxers have developed a central narrative consisting of three key messages: that Covid-19 is not dangerous, the vaccine is dangerous and that vaccine advocates “cannot be trusted”.

These messages are spread on hundreds of the most popular anti-vaccination groups on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, which have gained close to 877,000 new followers – totalling 59.2 million – since June.

An estimated 5.4 million of these followers are based in the UK, although many live in the US.

YouTube and Instagram are particularly fertile ground for anti-vaccine content, with each platform gaining around 4.3 million followers since 2019, according to CCDH analysis.

Facebook groups successfully convert people by providing effective “answering spaces” for addressing hesitancy around vaccines, identifying those who are exhibiting signs of vaccine hesitancy, testing their receptiveness to anti-vaccine content and pointing them towards online training courses to turn them into grassroots activists.

Undecided users are highly active in the online vaccine debate, research from social physicist Professor Neil Johnson found, meaning there is real opportunity for them to be convinced by sophisticated, adaptable anti-vaxxer approaches.

Risk of undoing good vaccine work
“Anti-vaxxers view the Covid vaccine as an opportunity to create long-lasting distrust in the effectiveness, safety, and necessity for vaccination,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the CCDH.

“Unless urgent action is taken, they may succeed.

“Currently, anti-vaxxers are permitted to organise, recruit, and spread outright lies which threaten human life to millions of people online. While the successful development of Covid vaccines was a cause for huge optimism for our ability to overcome coronavirus, that great work could be undone by this malignant Anti-Vaxx Industry of propagandists.

“It is vital that governments, social media platforms, and pro-vaccine advocates study the anti-vaxxers’ plan for the Covid vaccine, to avoid falling for their traps and do a better job of promoting the Covid vaccines as safe, vital and trustworthy developments.”

A Facebook spokesperson said the company removed Covid-19 misinformation that could lead to imminent physical harm, including false information about approved vaccines.

“Between March and October we removed more than 12m pieces of this type of content on Facebook and Instagram. We also ban adverts that include vaccine hoaxes or discourage people from getting a vaccine and we put warning labels over vaccine posts marked as false by third-party fact checkers.”