In the wake of massive anti-vaccination campaigns being waged around the world, the World Health Organization has identified vaccine hesitancy as a major public health issue jeopardizing countless lives. Recognizing the role that social media sites play in spreading vaccine misinformation, a group of global scientists are calling on companies such as Google and Facebook to help spread the word about vaccine safety. A recent issues of the Journal of Health Communication has published the Salzburg Statement on Vaccination Acceptance outlining the major health benefits resulting from vaccine use internationally. This includes the total eradication of diseases such as smallpox as well as the millions of lives being saved yearly through vaccination campaigns intended to control Hepatitis B, meningitis, measles, and polio. Not only is vaccination saving lives but it also makes good economic sense given that every dollar spent on vaccination is repaid many times over in reduced demand on health care services, lost time from work, and overall health improvement in most populations.
But the rising incidence of vaccine hesitancy threatens to reverse many of these gains. In 2017 alone, 110,000 people around the world died of measles, an otherwise preventable disease. And most of these deaths occurred in children younger than five years of age. In that same year, measles vaccinations across European nations fell below the 95 percent threshold needed to maintain herd immunity. As a result, measles cases have surged across much of Europe with dozens of children having died already.
"We are alarmed that the WHO this year declared vaccine hesitancy a top-ten international public health problem," says Scott Ratzan, founding editor of the Journal of Health Communication, in a recent news release. "This is a man-made, dangerous and wholly unnecessary crisis."
In the United States, measles outbreaks have occurred in eleven states with more than one thousand measles cases being reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though the United Nations has already implicated vaccine-averse parents in the crisis, finding real solutions continues to be a challenge.
Meanwhile, Facebook groups such as Stop Mandatory Vaccinations continue to share inflammatory posts outlining perceived dangers of vaccines, including videos from parents blaming vaccines for health problems in their children. Such groups mainly serve as an "echo chamber" to help anti-vaccine advocates collect more false stories about vaccines to bolster their arguments. That many of these stories are exaggerated and most studies finding health problems in vaccines have been discredited hardly seems to matter to the anti-vaccine lobby. While Facebook has already told media interviewers that it is fighting misinformation, little has been done to date. Other platforms, including Pinterest, and YouTube, have already acted to censure people knowingly spreading misinformation,
Though the anti-vaccine campaigns will likely continue, medical authorities and social media companies are doing what they can to ensure the actual facts about vaccination are getting out. Ultimately, every social media user needs to be skeptical about any new information they hear and be certain about the facts before passing it on to others.
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