The deaths of three Macedonian infants since December, 2018 due to a measles epidemic has been blamed on anti-vax propaganda pushed by right-wing populists in that country.
Over the past five years, measles vaccination rates in Macedonia have fallen sharply and are now among the lowest in Europe. As many as 10 new measles cases are being diagnosed daily according to that country's Institute for Public Health. Of those new cases, more than half are children below the age of four, most of whom are either not-vaccinated, not re-vaccinated, or had an unknown vaccine status.
During the early stages of the current measles epidemic, government agencies determined that over 15,000 children were unvaccinated in the capital city of Skopje alone. Despite an aggressive media campaign promoting the MMR vaccine, 8,434 people received the vaccine — 5,900 of them in Skopje , though this was not enough to stem the epidemic. Most epidemics can only be controlled through the herd immunity resulting from an 80-90 percent rate of immunes among a given population. In most parts of Macedonia, vaccination rates are deemed too low to prevent the continuing spread of measles and other diseases.
While anti-vax attitudes have always been popular among right-wing populists, media outlets controlled by Macedonia's right wing government began aggressively promoting anti-vax propaganda beginning in 2013. This included giving more air coverage to "alternative medicine" advocates and anti-vax activists, many of whom relied on propaganda being promoted in other parts of the world. Many of these advocates were declared to be "health experts" who insisted that the MMR vaccine was unsafe. One of them, Sladjana Velkov, had moved to Macedonia in 2016 after coming under fire in her native Serbia for promoting bleach therapy to treat children. Despite being discredited, government media sources continued to promote her conspiracy theories about vaccines as recently as last year.
But much of the support for the anti-vaccine movement in Macedonia also comes in the form of aggressive social media posts, many of which have been linked to "Russian trolls." In fact, researchers at George Washington University announced last August that 93 percent of the 1.8 million tweets about vaccines posted on Twitter between 2014 and 2017 came from bots and malicious accounts. According to a statement by the study researchers, these messages help undermine confidence in vaccines by drowning out legitimate debate about vaccines with often-abusive language claiming a conspiracy by vaccine producers. “Russian trolls and sophisticated bots promote both pro- and antivaccination narratives,” the researchers added. This creates a “false equivalency, eroding public consensus on vaccination.”
While the new government in Macedonia has promised democratic reforms to improve the quality of life , it is still not clear how health agencies hope to overcome the deep-rooted mistrust that is allowing epidemics to continue.
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