Covid-19 disinformation needs a global response

Friday, 4 March 2022

Fear, uncertainty and doubt about the vaccines clearly originated overseas, Peter Griffin argues.

Peter Griffin is a freelance science and technology writer. He was the founding director of the Science Media Centre and founding editor of Sciblogs.co.nz

OPINION: Like most Wellingtonians, I was glad to see the protestors moved on from the grounds of Parliament last Wednesday.

But is this the beginning of the end of the anti-mandate, anti-vax movement that was at the core of the protests, or just the end of the beginning? The signs are that it has already morphed into something more permanent and insidious.

I fear that we are totally unprepared to deal with it. Even before Covid-19 vaccines became available in 2020, the World Health Organisation was warning that they would face anti-vaccine sentiment from a staunch minority in many countries.

Two factors saw that prediction become a reality. Health agencies around the world, working against the clock to get their populations vaccinated, didn’t have time to develop public health campaigns that spoke effectively to the vaccine-hesitant. They basically said, “trust us, it’s safe”. That was insufficient and even counterproductive.

Stuff's Whole Truth project has published more than 50 articles examining misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine. These are the most common themes. (English subtitles)

* Protesters' mistrust and fear makes them easy targets for manipulation

* 'It's a hellscape': The age of misinformation is here - can government close the rabbit hole?

* Covid-19: Disinformation in Aotearoa has escalated since Delta outbreak

'All power ... to the Lovelocks of this world,” Stuff science columnist Peter Griffin writes.

* To frame anti-vaccine rhetoric as 'debate' is dangerous and wrong

The second factor was the wave of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that was cynically spread about the vaccines. Our prime minister correctly called out the foreign origins of that dis- and misinformation last week.

“There has, all the way through, been an element to this occupation that has not felt like New Zealand and that’s because it’s not,” Jacinda Ardern said.

A school teacher in Whangarei didn’t suddenly draw a link between 5G mobile networks and Covid-19 and start posting it on Facebook. An Auckland construction company owner writing on LinkedIn that Covid-19 was actually a genetically engineered bioweapon that leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, didn’t dream up that theory in isolation.

A group of superspreaders of disinformation, most of them based in the United States and Russia, is behind the bulk of the enduring conspiracy theories about Covid-19 that spread around the world via social media. They are responsible for deaths, in the same way the discredited British scientist Andrew Wakefield has blood on his hands for linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism in the 1990s.

Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy was hijacked by a range of far-right and anti-establishment groups to suit their own causes. They made for strange bedfellows with anti-mandate protestors on Molesworth St.

How do we address harmful disinformation? We can play whack-a-mole in our own country trying to snuff out disinformation. Or as the US scientist Professor Peter Hotez argued in Nature last year, we take collective, global action.

“The United Nations and the highest levels of governments must take direct, even confrontational, approaches with Russia, and move to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States,” he wrote.

There are parallels with terrorism, the nuclear threat and cybercrime. They threaten to destabilise nations, have global implications and require a united effort to confront. Disinformation needs to be added to the list.

Only by co-operating to root out the superspreaders of disinformation can we prevent the distrust, fear and anger of the anti-mandate movement and its darker offshoots from becoming an endemic strain running through society.