S2:E28: The rabbit hole
Thursday, April 8, 2021
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Episode description: How do we get the right information without falling down the rabbit hole of misinformation? In our final installment of our series on vaccine hesitancy, we look at misinformation—why it happens, who we can trust, and how we can avoid being duped ourselves.
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Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland California to Hamilton Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland California to Hamilton Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
A few weeks ago, the day we released the first episode of our three-part series on vaccine hesitancy, a good friend sent me an email. She hadn’t listened to the episode, but she’d seen a post about it on Instagram and was upset by what she’d seen.
That first episode looked at the COVID-19 vaccine up close—both from the perspective of Garnet Henderson, who was a Pfizer vaccine trial participant, and Dr. Joyce Sanchez, an infectious disease specialist. The Instagram post my friend saw was a photo of Joyce getting her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Paired with that photo was a 17-second audio trailer of Joyce talking about the vaccine—but my friend never heard those words.
“I can't bring myself to listen to the story because I'm scared of what you will say,” my friend wrote. “I feel powerless when I see needles in people's arms and feel strongly that it is likely causing more harm than good. I think the long-term health effects of this immune therapy will be devastating.”
I told my friend that I was sorry the photo had upset her, and that I hoped she’d listen to the episode—and the entire series, because they addressed many of her concerns. I told her that in creating this series, we didn’t have an axe to grind. In fact, some of us working on the episodes were vaccine hesitant ourselves. We were approaching vaccine hesitancy with real curiosity; we wanted to know if there were good reasons for those hestinacies.
In that first episode, “Trials and Tribulations,” we considered the process behind vaccine approval. In the second episode, “Shut up and listen,” we looked at the problematic history of vaccine trials—particularly when it comes to people of color. In this third and final installment, we’re looking at the question underneath all of our other questions: when it comes to information, who can we trust?
“No one is reading the real published information,” my friend wrote. She said she’d read through the CDC website and poured over Pfizer’s own fine print about the vaccine. “I read it because I’m a nerd,” my friend wrote. “But no one wants to hear about it.”
My friend is a thoughtful person and a fantastic mom. She has a graduate degree and is impressively accomplished in her career. We don’t always agree on everything, but I respect her opinion and her friendship is among those I treasure most.
For months our team has been researching and talking to people who have devoted their lives to understanding vaccines. But then I remembered what Joyce said in our second episode of this series: she said that when she has patients who are vaccine hesitant, the first and most important thing she can do is shut up and listen.
So I told my friend I was sorry that in all of our years of friendship, I’d never asked her why she was vaccine hesitant. I did want to hear her story. I wanted to understand her concerns not just about the COVID-19 vaccine, but vaccines in general. I wanted to explore the possibility that maybe she was right.
I was surprised to learn that my friend had vaccinated her older kids. She’d been grateful to have a pediatrician who was supportive of spreading out the vaccination schedule so her kids didn’t have to get their shots all at once.
But with her youngest child, things were different. My friend was in the throes of postpartum depression when she brought her 4-month-old daughter in for a well visit. She was about to get on an airplane to travel across the country with her baby, but she was feeling nervous about getting her vaccinated after a friend’s child had a febrile seizure the week after she’d gotten her MMR vaccine.
Joyce told me that especially as a parent, febrile seizures are very upsetting to witness—her own daughter had one when she was young when she was sick with an ear infection. They happen when a child’s temperature climbs quickly. But they’re also relatively common; 1 in 20 kids will have them, and they’re most often associated with chickenpox, the flu, ear infections, and tonsillitis. While they feel scary at the time, they’re usually harmless. Your chances for developing epilepsy later in life are the same as someone who’s never had a febrile seizure.
But instead of explaining this, my friend’s pediatrician dismissed her concerns and pushed her to vaccinate her daughter. When the nurse came in with the shot, my friend sat there silently, not wanting her daughter to get the vaccine, but feeling powerless to say no. After that day, she switched pediatricians. It was the last vaccine her daughter ever received.
My friend told me other stories too, of her dad being bullied into getting a pneumonia vaccine he didn’t want, of friends flashing their COVID vaccine selfies and only afterward considering their own histories of allergic reactions. She told me about a family member who had participated in the Pfizer vaccine trials and gotten really sick after her second shot—not just the usual soreness in the arm, but fever and swollen lymph nodes, which my friend found troubling and alarming. She didn’t trust this new mRNA vaccine, which didn’t really seem like a vaccine at all. She doubted that it would work long-term. She thought COVID numbers were dropping because the virus had run its course, not because people were getting vaccinated.
We can’t talk about vaccine hesitancy without first mentioning the anti-vaccine movement, what is casually referred to by vaccine supporters as “anti-vaxxers.” There are nuances within that movement, but generally speaking anti-vaxxers opt not to have their kids vaccinated for things like Tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella (or MMR), and chicken pox.
The anti-vaccine movement has been around as long as vaccines have. While some of their concerns over vaccines are very reasonable, unfortunately the anti-vaccine movement has also sometimes published disinformation that has fed fears about vaccines. The most notable example of this is one we’ve all probably heard of: the Lancet MMR Autism Fraud. In 1998, a British physician and researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a report in a major UK medical journal implying that there was a link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR.
Immediately after the report was published, the medical community rose up to refute the study, which had some obvious red flags. It only included 12 children, and many of Wakefield’s claims came not from what he’d observed, but the children’s parents’ theories about why their kids had gastrointestinal issues.
Under normal circumstances, this poorly-run study would have disappeared quickly in the face of so much criticism from the medical community. But Wakefield found some early strong supporters, including the celebrity Jenny McCarthy. While Jenny McCarthy championed the cause, the media continued to report Wakefield’s study for more than a decade. Meanwhile, more people were opting not to get the MMR vaccine, and measles, a disease that had been declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, began to have a resurgence.
For years other medical researchers tried to duplicate Wakefield’s findings, hoping to prove definitively that there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, but no one could reproduce his results.
In 2004, Brian Deer, a reporter at the Sunday Times discovered a conflict of interest that would eventually take the study—and Wakefield—down: some of the parents of the 12 children in the study had been recruited by a UK lawyer who was preparing a lawsuit against MMR manufacturers. The UK Legal Aid board had paid £55,000 to fund the research. Brian Deer’s investigations into Wakefield’s studies continued for two years, and during that time he found that the lawyers also paid Wakefield himself more than £400,000. Deer followed up with the families of each of the 12 kids, and found that “no case was free of misreporting or alteration.”
The British General Medical Council did their own inquiry into the allegations of misconduct against Wakefield, and in 2010 reported their findings: that Wakefield had manipulated his data, had acted against his patients’ best interests, and mistreated developmentally delayed children.
In 2011, The British Medical Journal declared Wakefield’s study fraudulent. Ten of Wakefield’s twelve co-authors published retractions, stating that there was no causal link between the vaccine and autism. The Lance fully retracted the study, noting that parts of the manuscript had been falsified and that the journal had been deceived by Wakefield. Three months later Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register.
Unfortunately, the idea that autism is linked to vaccinations still persists in some circles today. After he was barred from practicing medicine in the U.K, Wakefield moved to the U.S. and became a leader in the anti-vaccination movement. Jenny McCarthy continued in her support of Wakefield’s study and became the face of the anti-vaccination movement.
Jenny McCarthy had her own reasons for being vaccine hesitant. Her son was diagnosed with autism after getting the MMR vaccine. She later told CNN that her son has since recovered from autism through a regiment of diet change, supplements, and vitamins, and dismissed rumors that her son actually had Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, a rare disorder where kids lose the ability to verbalize and comprehend language. She went on to publish multiple books on the subject, claiming “the University of Google” as her source for research. She is the president of Generation Rescue, an anti-vaccination group that continues to spread the idea that there is a link between autism and vaccines despite continued evidence to the contrary.
For many autism researchers, this is incredibly frustrating. In a 2017 CNBC story, Alycia Halladay, the co-founder and president of the Autism Science Foundation, called the discussion about vaccines and autism a “distraction” that has diverted many thousands of research dollars to proving—or disproving—Wakefield’s fabricated study instead of funding research to find effective treatments for autism.
In 2019, the World Health Organization called vaccine hesitancy one of the top threats to global health. That same year, nearly 1300 cases of measles were reported in 31 U.S. states, mostly among people who had not gotten the MMR vaccine.
Baylor College of Medicine’s Peter Hotez said, "It's this massive propaganda campaign. By some estimates there are almost 500 anti-vaccine websites amplified on Facebook, they weaponize Amazon . . . we are seeing real public health damage being done."
Before we attack McCarthy and the anti-vaccination movement, we need to step back and consider how we got here in the first place.
I think it’s wroth saying up front that it’s not humanly possible to perfectly decipher and absorb the vast amounts of information we now have in our pockets, at our fingertips.The problem we’re facing isn’t so much one of a lack of information, but rather a surplus of it, with too few filters to discern what is based on fact and what is wishful thinking.
Whether we are pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine or just vaccine-hesitant, it’s hard to know who to trust. Even though we’d triple checked our research and made sure our sources were solid, before we recorded this episode, I called up Joyce again. If I’ve learned anything in researching this episode, it’s that we’re all susceptible to misinformation.
So to help us learn how we can protect ourselves from misinformation, we spoke with someone who has spent her life studying it.
Kolina: My name is Kolina Koltai and I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. I study how people use different social technical systems to facilitate decision-making in public scientific controversies, particularly when they dissent from this mainstream. But the way that I explain that to my parents is I essentially study anti-vaxxers on Facebook.
Laura: I don’t think I ever put “vaccine hesitancy” and “misinformation” in the same sentence until this past year, but Kolina has been studying those things since long before COVID-19.
Kolina: In 2015 when I first started pursuing my doctorate there was a measles outbreak at some theme parks like Disneyland. And there was this whole conversation about people deciding not to vaccinate. The whole idea of people choosing not to vaccinate really, really fascinated me. It obviously still fascinates me because I'm still researching it to this day.
Laura: Kolina studies how social media and online communities influence people’s choices about vaccines.
Kolina: Prior to 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic, you would have normally have to try to go to an anti-vax Facebook group or go follow an anti-vaccine activist to really get exposed to vaccine-hesitant related posts that questioned the safety or the efficacy or the necessity of vaccines. Jump forward to the past year, the vaccine is an everyday conversation. So it's no longer just relegated to fringe or niche communities online. It is pervasive everywhere.
Laura: Kolina said people like to think that you’re either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, when actually it’s more of a gray area. Some people who’ve received vaccines in the past are hesitant to receive the covid-19 vaccine because they’re worried about side effects. Others have a “wait-and-see” approach. It doesn’t mean they’ll refuse to get the shot; they’re just waiting to see how everyone else reacts to it first.
Kolina: So you can imagine someone who's like, well, I'm not sure about this vaccine. Maybe I like these other ones. Someone who's like, okay, I got vaccinated, but I still have a lot of hesitations. These are all different people who would be in this vaccine hesitant group.
All the anti-vaccine narratives on a very high level are basically the same narratives we've seen before over the past few decades. These often questioned the ideas of whether the vaccine is safe, is the vaccine efficacious? Is it necessary? What are the worries about the financial conflicts of interest? How was it developed? How's it being distributed? What are the mandates on it? And then even to the extreme of more conspiratorial thinking, so you could take the same things we've seen around say HPV vaccine or MMR vaccine, or even flu shot. And those same misleading narratives that could be placed with those vaccines. We're seeing them just completely repackaged today for the COVID-19 vaccines.
Laura: One of the most surprising things I learned from Kolina is that when people share misinformation, they’re not necessarily being malicious. In some cases they may even be attempting to fact-check that information, but not know where to look.
As a parent, I can put myself in Jenny McCarthy’s shoes long enough to imagine why she’s embraced the anti-vaccine movement. We all want our kids to be healthy and safe. Nothing will make my mama bear come out like someone trying to harm my children. Jenny McCarthy has said that she believes she was put on this earth to protect kids from autism and help the ones who already have it.
From a certain point of view I can even imagine what led Andrew Wakefield to his deeply flawed study with its fabricated findings. He was offered a lot of money to do research that he really believed in—research that would put him on the map not just of the medical community, but the world. Maybe he wanted those results to come out the way he predicted so badly that he was able to convince himself that he had good reason to skirt medical ethics. Although there is no excuse for publishing false scientific information, presented with the right circumstances or information—especially when that information triggers our emotions—we can convince ourselves to believe just about anything.
But Kolina says that there are people who are intentionally spreading false information, and this is where disinformation comes in.
Kolina: There is a difference between misinformation and disinformation. Disinformation with the D is putting out something that is false or misleading for the explicit purpose to manipulate. Versus misinformation does not have that same sort of intent. So I'm spreading misinformation, but I'm not deliberately thinking that it is false.
Laura: While misinformation can be passed along by well-meaning people who think they’ve found the truth, disinformation is often specifically designed to manipulate and convince even the most skeptical readers.
It’s nearly impossible to go online and not be bombarded by misinformation or even disinformation. What’s interesting about misinformation is that it works in the opposite way of traditional publications, where experts disseminate their research to the public.
In Anna Russell’s New Yorker story “The Fight Against Vaccine Misinformation,” Renée DiResta, a technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, said that misinformation “moves from the bottom up. It’s a meme or something that takes place within a single community that then finds its way through human connectors” and then into bigger groups.
Kolina says that these bottom-up efforts to scare people into not getting the vaccine have been amplified during the pandemic, because they don’t just appeal to our heads, but our hearts.
Kolina: Usually really effective misinformation elicits an emotional response in us.
Someone might post a personal story. You’ll see that story spread very quickly because it does elicit that emotional response in us, which makes us want to share it. You’ll have people who are major super spreaders who are spreading it. And ultimately misinformation gets its power through being shared and spread. If we see something and we don't spread it, it doesn't really go anywhere.
Laura: It’s been an unsettling year that has often left us feeling untethered. This pandemic year has been a year of unknowns, of feeling vulnerable, of reaching for control that keeps slipping from our grasp. With that uncertainty has come a surge of anti-vaccine misinformation and disinformation that triggers that insecurity. Kolina says that when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine, those efforts have been incredibly effective.
Kolina: We’re in this extended public health crisis where don’t have decades of research with COVID. This makes people feel very uneasy. There’s a lot of that uncertainty. It makes it easy for us to spread misinformation. People want to get more info. They want to know things. Here is a crisis that's happening. And then it spreads.
We sometimes see a handful of stories about potential injuries. And then we think Oh man, the vaccine is definitely not safe when we forget about the millions and millions of people. Who've already been vaccinated in the U S. They've had, , no symptoms, no death, no major issues. We don't often think about that. We think about the four cases we've heard and maybe I don't want that risk for myself.
It takes very little effort and time to really create misinformation. And it takes a lot more time and effort to counter that and correct it.
It is an uphill battle for people who are trying to combat the spread of misinformation , because it takes so much time to, fact check. It takes a lot of time to undo the damage.
Laura: A recent NPR study shows that “articles connecting vaccines and death have been among the most highly engaged with content online this year.” When I asked Joyce about this, she said that there have been people who have died after getting the COVID-19 vaccine—but she said that when you’re talking about millions of people getting vaccinated and a lot of those people are old and already in poor health, of course you’re going to have some deaths. But just because those two things are true doesn’t mean they’re connected. Kolina says that our brains are constantly trying to make patterns and connections—even when they don’t exist.
Kolina: Hank Aaron, who is a famous baseball player, passed away a couple of weeks after receiving the vaccine. You could just make the link. Oh, he got vaccinated a couple of weeks ago. It's probably related to the vaccine. Much later on, here's all the evidence of why that's not true, but by then the damage is done.
Laura: Most of us don’t have to look far to encounter misinformation or even disinformation. One of my husband’s childhood friends recently mentioned to us that he was hesitant about the vaccine because he’d read that the head of research at Pfizer had claimed that it caused female sterilization because it contains a spike protein known as syncytin-1, which is essential for the formation of the placenta.
I spent some time trying to get to the bottom of this claim. What I found is that the Pfizer head of research did not, in fact, make this claim. This misinformation came from a blog called “Health and Money News,” written by a retired British doctor who left Pfizer nine years ago, which is to say that he hasn’t been privy to information about the COVID-19 vaccine since long before COVID-19 was around.
The second problem with this claim is that it takes something that is true and twists it into something that is false. The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine does instruct our cells to make a spike protein—but it’s a different kind of spike protein, one that has nothing to do with reproduction.
In a recent story by the Atlantic, “The Surprising Key to Combating Vaccine Refusal,” Kolina said, “It’s not just fake information that might strengthen vaccine hesitancy . . . true information that is stripped of context could do the same thing.”
Kolina: There was a case of someone who had a terminal renal failure. the healthcare worker at the nursing homes explicitly said like, Hey, we vaccinated them because we were doing that for everyone here. And then the person died later on Hey, this is most likely cause they were in the late stage renal failure. They were already dying. And from that point, it seems reasonable to assume that case is related to prior existing conditions and not because of the vaccine, but that gets logged as a death associated with COVID. And then you can see how very real data can be decontextualized and used in a very misleading way.
Laura: Joyce pointed me to the CDC website, which states clearly that the FDA requires vaccination providers to report any death after vaccinations, and that the CDC follows up on any report to learn the cause of death and to determine whether that death was a result of the vaccine. Of the 145 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administred in the U.S. between December 14, 2020 and March 29, 2021, 2,509 people died—that’s 0.0017% of the people who were vaccinated. The report reads, “A review of available clinical information including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records revealed no evidence that vaccination contributed to patient deaths.”
Most of the concerns I heard from both my vaccine hesitant friends and the misinformation I encountered online boiled down to the misconception that the COVID-19 vaccine has been correlated with vaccine-related deaths, and confusion about what, exactly, vaccines—the mRNA vaccine specifically—is designed to do. It’s something I’ve been working hard to understand myself.
Joyce: The goal of a vaccine is really a way to train our immune system to recognize and neutralize a threat if your body comes into contact with that later. In this example the Corona viruses, the virus responsible for causing COVID-19, is the offender.
Laura: That was Dr. Joyce Sanchez. As a leading infectious disease specialist, Joyce understands infectious diseases—and vaccines—better than most of us.
Joyce: The principle way in which vaccines work is that they prime some of our immune cells called our B cells, our buff cells. When they're exposed to the vaccine, they develop antibodies that flag the real virus so our body can recognize it and destroy it before it has a chance to multiply and cause illness.
Laura: The goal of any vaccine is to get your cells to build up antibodies to fight off a virus. Some vaccines, like the ones used to fight off the flu or measles, use a weakened or dead version of the virus. Others like the Tetanus shot use an inert version of the virus. And then there are vaccines that use a small but harmless part of the virus. With all of these types of vaccines, the end result is the same: your cells learn to recognize the virus and they develop the antibodies needed to destroy the virus before it can make you sick.
Joyce: Historically vaccines have either used a piece of a virus or the whole virus, but has killed it. Or a live virus that is weakened so that your body can recognize what it looks like without actually having to sustain any illness.
Laura: Basically, you had to get a little bit of the virus to fight off the virus. But Joyce said that one of the really exciting things about the new COVID-19 mRNA vaccines—that is, the messenger RNA vaccine—is that they can protect us without actually exposing us to the virus itself.
Joyce: With COVID-19, we've had some more novel technologies to help prime the immune system. These messenger RNA vaccines are relatively newer technologies.There's a lot that has surprised me in a pleasant way.
Garnet: I think for most people, it's fear of the unknown, the fact that people don't really understand how vaccines work, and that they don't understand how the clinical trial process works, and how this trial could possibly have been sped up so much.
Laura: That was Garnet Henderson, a medical journalist and professional dancer who participated in the Pfizer vaccine trials. In our first episode of this series, she shared with us what she’d learned about the trial process, and why even though she considers herself a very anxious person and she doesn’t trust pharmaceutical companies, she felt confident in the vaccine.
Pfizer and Moderna are both mRNA vaccines. This is the first time that mRNA vaccines have been used for mass vaccinations, but they’re not new. Scientists have been working on mRNA vaccines for decades, trying to figure out how to use mRNA to prevent things like Zika, cancer, HIV, and the flu. They adapted that research to develop the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. But until now, there wasn’t the money or urgency behind that research to get us where we are today. Here’s Garnet again.
Garnet: These vaccines were built on decades of work that were done by scientists who have nothing to do actually with any of these pharmaceutical companies who worked on this stuff for decades when their research was terribly underfunded and it might not ever have been used were it not for this horrible pandemic.
The reason why these vaccines were ready so fast is because private companies and the U S government and many wealthy government's abroad threw tons of money at vaccine development. And we actually could be developing new vaccines this quickly, all the time. We just don't ordinarily invest in it to this degree. And so I think that's important to communicate to people as well, that this wasn't fast because it was rushed. It was fast because so many people across the country and across the globe worked so hard to make it happen fast. And because this is actually what happens when the wealthiest country in the world puts all of its resources into doing something good.
Laura: Once I finally understood how messenger RNA vaccines work, I started to get really excited. Because—how can I say this? It’s extremely cool.
Imagine that COVID-19 is the offender, the villain. I like to picture that villain as a masked bandit, maybe like Zorro but with a red mask instead of a black one. COVID Zorro wants to take you down, to steal your health or even kill you. But his method of attack is a little unconventional. He walks around with a bunch of metal straws sticking out of COVID Zorro like porcupine quills or spikes. COVID Zorro bumps into you or coughs on you or whatever, and those spikes stick into you. COVID Zorro passes his sickness to you through that straw, or spike, and you get sick.
This is basically what happens to your cells when they encounter the COVID-19 virus. The virus has spikes, and when enough of those spikes bump into your cells, the virus passes through those spikes into your cells and you get infected.
But what if someone sent you a message to say that COVID Zorro was coming, and they included in that message instructions for how to create some Mission Impossible style gadgets that would fend off COVID-Zorro’s attacks and send him running?
When that mRNA vaccine gets injected into your arm, that’s what it’ s doing. Messenger RNA is just what it sounds like: it’s a message with instructions on how to fight off COVID-19. What the instructions tell your cells is how to make the same spike proteins found on the COVID-19 virus, those metal straw porcupine quills. It only takes a few hours to pass along this message, and then the mRNA disappears. All that’s left behind are those spike proteins, which your body recognizes as COVID-19 and starts to fight off—even though those spikes don’t actually contain any of the virus. Your body sees them as a threat and builds up antibodies. If your body encounters the actual virus later, you’ll be ready.
A lot of the misinformation around the mRNA vaccines centers around the idea that the vaccine is reprogramming your DNA. And it is a little confusing. DNA and RNA sound really similar.
We’re not the only ones who have noticed this similarity. The disinformation spreaders saw it too. Maybe you’ve seen the Facebook video that claims that Bill Gates is using the vaccine to reprogram human beings. I found out that the person who posted that video is a personal development coach; he might be good at helping people find their career path, but he doesn’t seem to have the medical or science credentials to back up his claims. In fact, his video reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what mRNA is and how the mRNA vaccine works.
I asked Joyce about these claims anyway. She said no, mRNA vaccines do not reprogram your DNA. mRNA can’t do anything to change your genetic code. For one thing, DNA and RNA aren’t the same thing. Messenger RNA is a single strand that has instructions on how to make a protein like that spike protein we talked about. Our body is producing mRNA all the time because it needs to make proteins to do just about everything.
But that messenger RNA is just that—a messenger. It can’t change our genetic code, and even if it could, it wouldn’t be able to, because it can’t get inside the nucleus of our cells where our DNA lives.
RNA is also very unstable, which is why those mRNA vaccines have to be kept at a very specific temperature. But the upside of that is that they break down as soon as they’ve done their job, in just a few minutes, so we don’t have to be freaked out about them hanging around in our bodies.
Over the last couple of years, social media companies have started to ban content they consider to be harmful misinformation. But banning content hasn’t slowed down the spread of misinformation and disinformation. To their credit, Facebook did flag the Bill Gates video as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation—but not before over 48,000 people had viewed it.
What’s tough about these sources of misinformation and disinformation is that they often appear innocent until proven guilty. In the same New Yorker Article we mentioned earlier, Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate said that “There are millions and millions of vaccine-hesitant people, and there are a few anti-vaxxers,” he said. Still, it’s a vocal minority. “Anti-vaxxers are an industry. They are a sophisticated proselytization machine,” motivated by money, power, the desire to create chaos, and, in some cases, a sincere belief that the public has been duped. While it takes a lot of information and effort to convince vaccine hesitant people that vaccines are safe, anti-vaxxers only need to “persuade them to do nothing. All they need to do is raise doubt.”
Kolina: It takes very little effort and time to really create misinformation. And it takes a lot more time and effort to counter that and correct it. It is an uphill battle for people who are trying to combat the spread of misinformation, because it takes so much time to fact check. It takes a lot of time to do the work to undo the damage.
Laura: That damage often comes in the form of fear. One of the things that my friend mentioned was that she was concerned about how sick a family member had gotten after she’d gotten the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
On their website, the CDC has a list of the possible side effects from the Covid-19 vaccine, which are more likely to occur after the second dose. Common side effects include pain, swelling, redness at the injection site, headaches, muscle pain, chills, fever, tiredness, nausea, and the swollen lymph nodes that my friend found so alarming. These side effects are not considered abnormal, anMedical Experts Spread Word About Harmless COVID-19 Vaccine Reactionsd they typically go away within a few days. Also, not everyone experiences them.
What’s important to understand is that these side effects aren’t an actual sickness; in most cases they’re a good thing. They’re proof that the vaccine is working. Think about when you start to come down with a cold; you get a runny nose or a sore throat—that’s not the cold itself, but your body trying to fight off sickness. When your body is building antibodies to fight off COVID-19, you’ll often get the symptoms that go along with your body’s immune response to the virus. Younger people, who have stronger immune systems, are more likely to experience strong side effects. But this varies from person to person. Many people don’t experience side effects at all, and a lack of symptoms doesn’t necessarily mean your immune system isn’t working.
Garnet: I do think that Pfizer and Moderna both have done a decent job of communicating this, that there are side effects that are associated with these vaccines that are a bit stronger than what most of us are used to from other adult vaccines.
Laura: In a story by Healthline, Dr. Debra Powell, who is the chief of infectious diseases at Tower Health in Pennsylvania, said, “The first vaccine teaches your body how to react to the virus. When you feel sick or have a fever, that’s largely your body responding. It’s usually a very short-term thing and much better than getting COVID and being sick for 2 weeks or in the hospital.”
Garnet: I thought it was cool. I even think it's cool that my lymph nodes got all swollen and weird looking because it means that the vaccine worked and my immune system had a really strong response. That makes me feel great. And a lot of people told me that hearing me talk about the symptoms that I experienced made them feel less nervous.
Joyce said that most of the time when people get those side effects, it’s a good thing. But there’s a difference between normal side effects and what’s called “adverse side effects.” And she says the one that people worry about is something called anaphylaxis, when a person has an allergic reaction that makes it difficult to breathe.
Garnet: Another question I got a lot weeks and months later was, “oh, are you still feeling okay?” Which is another thing that just shows to me that a lot of people are understandably a little apprehensive, but just don’t really understand how vaccines work, because any really adverse reaction to a vaccine is going to happen usually within hours. It's extremely unlikely that just out of the blue something bad would happen, like I would have some kind of adverse medical event.
Laura: Joyce said that anaphylaxis is extremely rare—out of every million people who have gotten the COVID-19 vaccine, just 2 to 5 people have experienced it. It almost always occurs within thirty minutes after getting the vaccine, and vaccination providers have medicines available to treat it immediately.
But there was something else that came up in my conversation with my friend that is maybe bigger than all of these things. She said that she doesn’t think the vaccines really work, that we’re seeing the COVID case numbers improve not because of vaccination, but because the weather is getting warmer and the virus has run its course.
I asked Joyce about this when I spoke to her earlier this week. She said that while she generally feels very optimistic about where we are right now, she’s also worried about the new B117 variant of the virus that we saw first in the U.K. Joyce quoted CDC director Rochelle Walensky in saying, “right now, I’m scared.”
The B117 variant we’re now seeing in places like Michigan has her very concerned, because this variant of the virus is more contagious, and is causing more severe illness in young
people in a way that we haven’t seen before. Earlier this month Michigan reported more than 5600 cases a day, up from 1000 a day in February when the weather was colder. This trend is even more troubling because many have relaxed mask wearing and social distancing, and a substantial portion of the population still isn’t vaccinated. An additional P.1 variant that spread through Brazil has also now been found in Michigan and 20 other U.S. states.
Joyce said that she’s very concerned, but not surprised. This is how viruses work, and also why the only way to end this pandemic is for enough of us to get the vaccine to protect those who aren’t vaccinated.
Joyce: That is something that we expected from day one. That's what viruses do. It's normal for them as they replicate there'll be certain mistakes that happen and that's just by chance.
And occasionally sometimes there is a new tent where. It gives it an advantage, maybe more infectious as is the case with some of these variants of concern that have come from the UK or South Africa, Brazil. that's where we really want to ensure that our current measures, our current vaccines, our current therapies are still able to do what they should be doing.
These mutations have caused them to be more contagious. So if one person gets infected with one of these variants, they're more likely to spread it to more people than the former variant. And if it spreads more easily, then it can cause more people to get ill and lead to increased hospitalization.
What's promising is that these vaccines that we're using. Even if they were not formulated for these variants, initially the immune systems that people Mount are so rich that they can still recognize and neutralize and reduce the severity disease and reduce the hospitalizations and reduce the deaths. And these won't be the last variants. As long as this virus is multiplying and spreading, there are opportunities for more variants to come up.
Laura: Joyce said that as variants come up, there may need to be updates to the vaccine—but this is another reason that the mRNA vaccines give us a huge advantage.
Joyce: These currently available vaccines can be manufactured very quickly. If you get the genome, you can manufacturer the vaccine in a lab with these platforms. It doesn't take months like influenza vaccine, where you have to.
Grow virus. these are vaccines that can be manufactured quickly. So that's, one advantage of these platforms. And if it takes getting a booster in a couple of years, or the development of a vaccine that has several variants or strains in it, for example, flu. The flu vaccine has three strands of flu that you'd get protected against them.
Others have four. So there may be some future iterations of. The Corona virus vaccines that may incorporate more than one strain. And, thankfully, some of the efforts that are being done now, both by the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies that are manufacturing vaccines they're interested in knowing this is going to be something that is long lasting and if we have to evolve and, make new formulations, time will tell.
Many vaccines. Work much better and further enrich the strength, durability and the quality of your response. If it's given the quote booster.
So a second dose. So you're primed with the first dose, but you're really getting high quality long lasting anybody with that second dose. And we've seen that with Madonna and Pfizer, where. One dose will give you about 50% protection. But after that second dose, when you've had the chance to develop those antibodies, that's where you get the 94 95% efficacy that have been reported in the clinical trial.
Lots of vaccines have that the hepatitis vaccines have a first dose and then a booster. The tennis vaccine. People get boosted every 10 years because it's not a very long lasting type of. Vaccine. So it's been shown that people need to get reboost.
It at least every 10 years, sometimes sooner. Other vaccines have really great durability. So when we think about measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, you get a first dose. And then the second dose, which is the booster. But after that, you're good for life and that's great.
And we'll see if the COVID vaccines. Have that track record. I'm not sure if they will, but that would be best case scenario
Laura: Joyce said that while she finds it concerning that this new variant affects kids, she’s also seen that mask wearing works to protect people from the virus. She says that this is essential while we wait for the data to feel confident giving kids the vaccine, but she’s also hopeful that we’ll see that day come soon.
Joyce: It's possible that if you immunize kids. That they have longer durability of immunity. That's definitely been shown. When we think about vaccines, like human papilloma virus or HPV, the virus that causes cervical cancer, if you vaccinate early or in adolescents in childhood, you only need two doses, but if you're late to the party, you need a third dose.
So I'm actually optimistic for kids and, we may see that they have longer lasting immunity,
Garnet:I hope that the pace of vaccination will continue to accelerate really rapidly in the United States and also around the world, because I fear these new variants, And I fear that a lot of people who live in. Less wealthy countries, won't have quick access to the vaccine and they will suffer and die needlessly. And also that COVID will become like the flu, but worse and be something that never leaves us unless we really act. And again, we meaning the United States. Really throw our weight and our money behind ensuring that people here can get vaccinated, but also that people all over the world can get vaccinated.
Kolina: I do think on a national level there does need to be a major initiative in combating and addressing the issue of misinformation. And it's not just one person's job. It's not just healthcare providers' job. It's not just a politician's job. It's not just health officials, not just educators, it is everyone's job. It's very easy to put all the blame to social media platforms.
For example, trust in pharmaceutical companies, there are very real things that happened to degrade our trust.
Garnet: I don't think Pfizer is a good company. I don't really trust them . I think most of the time they're pretty big villain, but what I do trust is the individual people. The doctors and the other scientists and the nurses and the medical assistants and the administrators who were working at my test site and who were working so incredibly hard. To save lives.
I understand people, not having faith in institutions pharmaceutical companies and our government, but I do have faith in all of those individual people. Who worked really hard to develop this vaccine. I trust them and I trust their work and I trust that they wouldn't have been involved with the trial and the development of the vaccine, if they didn't believe that it was safe and effective.
Laura: Garnet was among the people who participated in the Pfizer vaccine trials. Thinking back to Andrew Wakefield’s faulty MMR study with 12 people, it’s worth noting that over 75,000 people have participated in the trials for the Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax vaccines. Of those 75,000, not one person has died or been hospitalized after four weeks. As of this week, over 19% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated. Researchers say we need to get that number to 70-85% if we want to stop COVID-19 from spreading through our communities and end this pandemic.
Kolina: Have you ever seen a disaster movie and at the beginning of the movie, there's this scientist, who's dropping their papers. People aren't listening to them and they're like, Oh no, the world's going to end. And the scientist gets ignored. And then suddenly there's all this catastrophic failure.
I felt like that scientist because it's what we're seeing now, this wave of vaccine hesitancy particularly in online social media is something that I've been talking about for years and not just me, but many other people who researched similar topics as I do.
Laura: As we’ve worked on this series, our team has spent dozens of hours sorting through information, digging our way through the misinformation to get back to primary sources and make sure that the information we were getting wasn’t misinformation. We’ve sought out voices like Kolina and Joyce and Garnet, people who can speak not just from personal experience but a lifetime of researching and learning. But most of us don’t have dozens of hours to spend on research, or the access to talk to the experts whenever we have questions. So I asked Kolina if she had any advice for us as we’re trying to figure out who we can trust.
Kolina: Education is of course a major component of this, but not the end all be all. And a great example is that, we'll see people within the anti-vax space who have a variety of educational backgrounds, these are not just people who only completed high school. And, it's not just a pure issue of information because arguably there is a ton of pro-vaccine and debunking information out there. So it is a larger problem than that.
Kolina: There are a variety of debunking techniques or information assessment techniques that we could recommend that we could teach in classes. One of the ones I tend to recommend is one that was developed by Michael Coffield who's a professor and data literacy expert who uses a technique called the SIFT technique, which is S I F T.
First Stop. You investigate the source. That's the I there you see who is sharing this information? Where is this article from, or where's this quote where's that from is this a trustworthy source? Is it not finding better coverage? So are there other organizations other people talk about this? Is this the only outlet that's covering this particular phenomenon and then a T is a tracing claims, quotes and media to original context. a quote that's taken out of context from an interview can make something look very misleading but then if you searched for that direct quote in that original interview, you could read the full context.
Laura: This is the process we go through at Shelter in Place, one that from the beginning we’ve employed, though I didn’t have a name for it then. It takes time to fact check and search for primary sources, but that process is also rewarding, because usually it gives me a much more nuanced understanding of whatever I’m researching.
Kolina said she wants to “encourage people to improve their own gut checks when they encounter something that might potentially be misinformation.”
Kolina: And what's great is that actually, there are a lot of debunking resources out there. For example, Reuters does a lot of a vaccine debunks particularly for new vaccine misinformation that occurs and they explain here are all the reasons why this is true or not true.
If you happen to have someone in your life that maybe is going down this vaccine hesitant rabbit hole, or you yourself are going down this vaccine hesitancy rabbit hole, you're not sure what to believe. And first of all, that's fine. That's okay. It's a very natural normal thing to experience particularly right now. But what I always find helpful for me, particularly as someone who reads and looks at anti-vaccine content all day, every day, and I have for years is going back again to sources that I trust that helped me debug and further looking at the explanation. One thing that'll happen in conspiratorial thinking or misleading information is that they'll sometimes guide the dots in a particular way. So X Y happens, it's therefore Z. We like patterns. But then I'll go to a source that says, actually, this is why that's not true, And you're like, Oh, okay. That makes sense. Working with your loved one helping them go through this debunking process is going to be really helpful.
Laura: In her story, “Research fraud catalyzed the anti-vaccination movement. Let’s not repeat history.”, Julia Belluz says that while Wakefield began the Lancet MMR Autism Fraud, the media was equally to blame. She writes, “We journalists are still doing this today on myriad health topics. We report on single, often poorly designed studies — even if they don’t deserve an ounce of attention. Part of this has to do with how newsrooms work:
Reporters favor anomalies and novelty instead of slow and plodding progress.”
Julia said that in chasing the next new story, journalists also tend to “focus a lot more on the anti-vaccine movement and their concerns than on the astounding progress made against vaccine-preventable diseases.”
But it’s important to note that that slow and plodding progress includes things like the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, which eradicated a gruesome and painful illness that killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century. It’s these kinds of success stories that have convinced that vaccination is the only way to end this pandemic.
Joyce: I absolutely. I'm an advocate for vaccines being health professional, they are so important to, human civilization ,you have to understand what the purpose of vaccines are.
They're not to inconvenience you. They're not to give you discomfort. it's to protect you as an individual from disease. if we have a vaccine that can prevent disease, why wouldn't you want to go for it? If it's safe, if it's effective. Even if it's not a hundred percent effective, they are able to reduce disease severity.
What a wonderful success, smallpox. scoured, our early us history for a long time. And once we had a safe and effective vaccine against smallpox it's since been eradicated that is where we would like to get with all vaccine preventable diseases. And I don't know if we'll get there with COVID-19 or other prone to viruses, but that certainly is what we aim to do.
Laura: It’s a lot of work to figure out how to get the right information. It’s easier to accept whatever is in front of us and not question it. Every single one of us is susceptible to that, and let’s be honest—it’s been a long year. We can’t fight misinformation alone. We need people in our life to help us, experts we can trust, people like Joyce and Kolina and Garnet to pull us out when we’re falling down the rabbit hole. We could even say that what we need is to get vaccinated against misinformation.
Kolina: One thing that I do hope for going forward is that there's real concerted effort in addressing how big of an issue this really is. Me and millions, millions of other people want this pandemic to be done with, we're all very tired. I'm done sheltering in place myself. I wanna be able to go out and connect with people besides through zoom. And so my big hopes. is that we all work together towards addressing this misinformation issue. it's not a left or right leaning issue. It is something that we are all susceptible to, even me who looks at the stuff all day is always susceptible to misinfo. And so hopefully we move forward to addressing it as a national emergency.
If there was a magic bullet to, to fix all this, we would be doing it. There isn't an easy answer of, here's the absolute solution that needs to happen. I could just say people for themselves practice, data literacy techniques practice the act of debunking, stopping and pausing before we decide to share something.
Laura: I asked Joyce what advice she has for us as we try to navigate misinformation and make informed decisions about our health
Joyce: I wish I had a one size fits all answer for you. The fact of the matter is everyone gets their information from various sources. But the piece of advice that I give my patients is if you have a primary care doctor, ask them what they think. They're the ones who are distilling that medical knowledge. And then they also know you. And your medical history more intimately than any other medical expert.
And I realize a lot of people may not have a primary care doctor and if you don't but have a means to do so, I highly encourage you to do so. Even if you think you're in peak of your health, there's preventative services that you would benefit from. And if it's someone who you don't like, or you don't jive with, you know, just like you're looking for a therapist or a spouse. if it's not a good match, that's okay. You don't have to apologize. You can find them another doctor. I tell this to patients all the time, if you would like a different opinion, I'm never offended by that.
I think it's good to find someone who you can open up to establish a relationship because medicine is not just a scientific specialty.
There's something to be said about the more holistic approach and that's a really good starting place when we talk about good, reliable, accurate information.
Laura: By having a primary care provider you have an established connection with a specific person within the industry that you can trust and who can communicate with you about difficult medical decisions. But a recent story in Reuters reported that the number of Americans with primary care physicians has been declining.
This can certainly be beneficial with the democratization of information on the internet making medical data and research more accessible than ever, but it also makes it easier for us to stumble upon untrustworthy sources and fall under the spell of misinformation campaigns.
Garnet: It's really easy to appeal to fear, right? I mean, everyone is going to respond really strongly to that.
I mean, I, I contemplate deleting all of my social media all the time and I still haven't done it, but I don't post very much anymore on social media, but this was something that I did post about. I tried to take some photos of my experience and I shared those photos and a little bit about. The trial and what it was like to participate in it after the vaccine got approved.
And then again, recently after I officially got unblinded and yeah, I got a lot of really enthusiastic responses and I think that's exactly why you see so much about the fear and the what ifs. And I just don't see as much of the excitement and the joy that comes along with. Just reveling in the fact that humanity did an incredible thing.
We created multiple effective vaccines for a new disease in less than a year. That's amazing. That's something to be really excited about, and not, to fear,
Laura: I understand why my friend was upset when she saw that photo of Joyce with a needle in her arm. Especially when we’re feeling uncertain about so much of life right now—and if vaccines are among the things that make us feel nervous—images like that can trigger our fear. But I also think Garnet is right, that humanity did an incredible thing worth celebrating. Part of combating fear and misinformation is sharing the good stuff when we can—whether that is the slow and plodding progress of silence, or our own story of getting the vaccine.
At Shelter in Place, we believe that transforming our communities begins by transforming ourselves, and so today I want to end this episode by introducing you to the women on our team who helped put it together. Each of us has been on a journey of transformation as we’ve researched and done interviews and grappled with the data. We didn’t all end up at exactly the same place, but we’ve all grown in this process. We hope that our work can help you along this journey, too. I’ll let our team take it from here.
Elen: My name is Elen Tekle and I’m a 26-year-old Black woman living in Los Angeles and working as an apprentice at Shelter in Place. Both my parents are from Eritrea, Africa and I was born and raised in Arizona.
When I heard that Johnson & Johnson was working on their own vaccine and was trying to get it approved by the FDA, I looked at my dad and said, “I won’t be getting their vaccine, and no one in this family is allowed to receive it either.” We got into a huge argument about it, and at one point I yelled, “how can I trust a company that’s messed up Tylenol twice.” I feel okay about Pfizer and Moderna because they’ve been shown to be 95% effective, but I feel nervous about J&J because of their history of recalls and their efficacy numbers are so much lower.
I know all of the reasons why J&J could be really great, especially for communities where people don’t have the best access to healthcare or where it’s hard for them to get multiple doses of a shot. Another benefit is that the J&J vaccine can be stored in refrigerator temperatures for 3 months, which means it lasts way longer and is more accessible to distribute than the other two vaccines. I do know some people who have already received the J&J vaccine, and they’re fine, but I can’t shake this feeling that there might be late-onset side effects.
I shared my views with a friend who called me irresponsible and stubborn for not receiving whatever vaccine would be available. In his eyes, I was being selfish because I was putting my concerns above the safety of the public. I’m not anti-vaccine; I believe vaccines are good and that they work, but he made me feel like a villain.
Then I started working on this episode. We did so much research. We took a deep dive not just into the vaccines, but the way we get our information. While we were working on this episode, we learned that 15 million doses of J&J were tossed due to contamination. My anxiety levels spiked again. But then we learned that the problem wasn’t with the vaccine itself, but that the plant that produced it accidentally contaminated it with the ingredients for the Aztrazenica vaccine. The plant was in the process of trying to get FDA approval as a vaccine manufacturer, the error was caught, and no doses left the plant.
I still feel hesitant, but sorting through the information to get to the bottom of my fear helped a lot. There’s a long history of people of color being taken advantage of and even harmed in vaccine trials, which we talked about in our last episode. It’s been hard to face those fears, and to weigh my distrust of pharmaceutical companies with the good things I’ve learned about the vaccine itself.
One of the things I’ve been considering lately is that even though the J&J efficacy rates aren’t as high for preventing COVID as the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are, they are 100% effective in preventing hospitalization and death from the virus. This is huge. As Anthony Fauci, said, “it’s really important to focus on the severe end of the spectrum, preventing hospitalization and death.”
This week I stopped by a nearby hospital to see if I could get a walk-in appointment for the vaccine. I didn’t know which vaccine the hospital was providing. I honestly didn’t know how I would have reacted if I was offered Johnson & Johnson. I still don’t fully trust them. But I’m beginning to understand that the risks of getting that vaccine are far outweighed by the benefits.
But when I filled out my vaccine card, the site employee asked if Moderna was okay. I let out a big sigh of relief. Knowing all that I do about mRNA, I was really hoping to get that vaccine.
I never imagined I’d feel that excited to get a shot in my arm. Not just because I’m excited to be protected from COVID, but because it was this moment when I realized just how far I’d come in this journey of understanding.
I’m still on that journey. I’m still learning. But I feel incredibly grateful to understand what I’m saying yes to, and how it can help not just me but the people around me.
Isobel: My name is Isobel Obrecht and I’m an apprentice at Shelter in Place from San Francisco. When Alana pitched the idea for these episodes to our team, I immediately asked if I could join her, because I’ve got my own complicated history with vaccines.
Before my mother found out she was pregnant with me, she was on a course of strong antibiotics. Because of this, when I was born, my stomach was unable to digest food, and my immune system was very weak. Of course, my mother was especially worried when I got my vaccines, because I had really violent side effects, like swelling, fevers, and sickness that would last for months. At the time, all of these things were dismissed by doctors. My health problems continued, and so eventually my mom went to an alternative medicine doctor that a friend had recommended. This doctor was categorically anti-vaccine. He even repeated the myth that MMR vaccine caused autism and was horrified to learn that I had already received that vaccine. My mom couldn't find any evidence to support that claim, so she dismissed it, but she did take his recommendation to have me take Cod liver oil supplements to help build back healthy gut flora, and it worked. My gut flora was restored, and I was finally able to digest food.
But here’s the thing. Both me and my brother were fully vaccinated. Even while my mom took me to alternative medicine doctors, she also took me to get my scheduled vaccines. And maybe because of that alternative medicine, eventually I was able to get vaccines without becoming intensely ill. I asked my parents why they didn’t turn to the anti-vaccine movement when they saw the terrifying side-effects I experienced and had their valid concerns dismissed by medical professionals. Their answer surprised me.
My mom told me that she thought the benefits of getting them [vaccines] always outweigh the risks. She knew people who had experienced permanent side-effects from polio; she said the diseases themselves were almost always a lot worse than the possible adverse side effects from the vaccines.
When I hear about parents who don’t vaccinate their healthy, non-immunocompromised kids, I always think about how dependent I was on my healthy classmates to get vaccinated and protect me because often my vaccines were spread out and delayed so that I could have time to get over the inevitable sickness. At the same time, I understand people who feel that their fears are being dismissed by the medical establishment.
Even though my parents both recently got their first dose of the Moderna vaccine, I would still describe them as vaccine hesitant. They always do their research. They weigh very carefully whether the severity of the disease warrants the vaccine. Often their hesitancy is about the preservatives in vaccines. Even though there is no evidence that those preservatives are harmful, ingredients like aluminum and formaldehyde even occur naturally in the human body, I will admit to slight hesitancy myself. Not enough to dissuade me from getting vaccinated. But enough to make me anxiously check my research, to stay up on news, to make sure I’m not succumbing to misinformation about vaccines, and all the process of making this series of episodes has done, is strengthen my confidence in the necessity, efficacy, and safety of vaccines.
Alana: I’m Alana Herlands, and I’m a born and bred New Yorker. A couple of months ago, I pitched the idea for this series to our team at Shelter in Place, and I want to share a bit about why it’s been so important to me. But to get there, I need to go back further, to my childhood.
I grew up eating cheeseburgers, devouring my mom’s homemade meatballs and spaghetti, deli sandwiches, and drinking glasses of milk. I never imagined I’d become a vegetarian let alone a vegan, but as I began learning more about what animal products were doing both to my body and to this planet, I slowly became convinced that I needed to make a change. Once I made that change, I was surprised to discover that eating plants could make me feel great and I’m still vegan to this day, six years later. The more I learned about the unsustainable, inhumane practices that were behind my diet, the more I began questioning not just my food choices, but what I’d been taught in every other area of my life.
I believe this kind of questioning is healthy. It’s an essential part of growing up and becoming a good citizen of the world to question the status quo. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing; I started to wonder “well, what else don’t I know? What else haven’t people told me?” I started wondering if my doctors were lying to me, if medications and vaccinations I was told to take were safe, if turning to homeopathy was the answer. What began as healthy skepticism quickly turned into paranoia. I started to question everything.
Around that time, I took a critical thinking class in college. I learned more about how our brains work, about how our brains like to create patterns out of chaos—even when it means tying things together that aren’t actually connected. Maybe this would be discouraging for some people, but I found this idea inspiring. I loved this idea that even my own brain could trick me, that the connections that seemed obvious to me might not actually be connected. At a time when I was headed down the rabbit hole of becoming overly skeptical, that class pulled me back and made me reconsider. It completely changed the way I make decisions. It put me on a different path.
My boyfriend is also a psychologist and I’m generally surrounded by people who trust the scientific process. Instead of just seeing every situation as a reason for doubt, I stopped to ask myself where that fear was coming from. I found people, in my personal life and in the medical community, to advise me who I could trust, who could check me if I was falling down the rabbithole of fear and misinformation. It might sound silly but I quickly found critical thinking to be magical. Realizing that there were tools and processes that could help me make sound decisions—and that it was okay to sit with uncertainty while I was figuring things out—was profoundly healing. It made me more compassionate to others in my life who were caught in their own hesitancy and doubt. Most of all, it made me feel less afraid.
I’m now excited to go to the doctor’s office to get my necessary immunizations and take medication when I need it. How did I get here? Education, support, and community.
While being an apprentice here at Shelter in Place, I’ve come to realize that this show is about what makes us human, and sitting with that, even if it’s uncomfortable, and trying to find a way forward.
Fear sells. It’s sad but true and it’s how our brains are wired. The reason I pitched this series was not only because it is timely and extremely important, but because I feel great empathy for those who feel that paranoia, because I know what it’s like to be in that place.
This world is sometimes a scary place, but it’s also an exciting one. The more I’ve learned about these new vaccines, the more I’ve felt wowed by the science that has brought us here. Working on this series has given me a chance to step back and feel joy over these discoveries. I feel excited to be a part of protecting ourselves and our communities. Joy comes with understanding, feeling heard, not disenfranchised.
We talk a lot at Shelter in Place about transforming our communities by first transforming ourselves. We’ve tried to show again and again in this series that there is still a lot of work to be done—not just in spreading awareness and understanding about vaccinations, but in having conversations in our own lives that allow people to voice their fears and work through that uncertainty. If you take anything away from this series, I hope you come away feeling less afraid and more equipped to protect yourself and your community. I hope you’ll join us in being genuinely curious when we encounter things we don’t understand and seek advice and opinions from multiple sources. There’s more than enough room for all of us in this Shelter in Place community, so we hope you’ll come on in. Thank you so much for listening.
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Here at Shelter in Place, we’re trying to do our part in combating misinformation. But don’t take our word for it. You can find links to all of the research we mentioned and the people we quoted in our show notes at shelterinplacepodcast.info.
While you’re there, we’d love for you to consider supporting the good things happening here, including our new apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of women podcasters and creative entrepreneurs. Shelter in Place is listener supported, and we survive on donations. You can donate for as little as a dollar a month at shelterinplacepodcast.info.
If you’d like to help us but can’t donate, consider becoming an ambassador for Shelter in Place. When you use our unique referral link, we’ll give you a shoutout on our website just for signing up. Share Shelter in Place with your friends and we’ll send you special bonus material, like the video footage of our April Fool’s Day prank where for a day we rebranded as an animal podcast called The Peaceful Wombat. Each month, we’ll recognize our listener of the month with a special thank you on an episode.
Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Alana Herlands was our associate producer for this episode. Isobel Obrecht was our assistant audio editor, and Elen Tekle was our assistant editor.
Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Winnie Shi, Eve Bishop, Melissa Lent, Isobel Obrecht, Alana Herlands, Michele O'Brien, Clara Smith, Samantha Skinner, Elen Tekle, Shweta Watwe, and Quan Zhang.
Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
// Show notes: additional sources //
This is the third installment of a 3-part series on vaccine hesitancy. Listen to episode 1 “Trials and Tribulations” here and episode 2 “Shut up and listen” here.
State of NJ / Rutger University Medical School: comic showing how COVID-19 mRNA vaccines work.
CDC: mRNA explained
University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy
Mayo Clinic: Febrile seizures explained; explained again (video)
CDC: research shows vaccines do not cause autism
“Research fraud catalyzed the anti-vaccination movement. Let’s not repeat history.” By Julia Belluz
Vox: former doctor Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent autism study
Business Insider: Jenny McCarthy and the anti-vaxx movement
CNBC: Autism risk factors (the persistent false belief linking autism and vaccines)
Short but interesting New Yorker story about falsified claims that the first woman to get a COVID vaccine in Britain died (she didn’t).
Misinformation about CA wildfires
BBC: Claims that vaccinations harm fertility unfounded
NY Times: Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World
Politifact: the conspiracy theory seen on Facebook about Bill Gates and vaccines
CDC: possible adverse side effects after COVID-19 vaccine.
Vox: why it’s a good thing if you have side effects.
Swollen lymph nodes are a common side effect
Vox video that explains how different vaccines work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvA9gs5gxNYThe Atlantic, “Vaccine hesitancy isn’t just one thing.”
The Fight Against Vaccine Misinformation, The New Yorker
Harvard Business Review article about data literacy.
Read how Andrew Wakefield's vaccine and autism theory was fraudulent here, here and here
See number of measle outbreak over the years
Check out the staff at the Autism Science Foundation
CDC's list common side effects of the vaccine
Listen to NPR's story on Few Facts, Millions Of Clicks: Fearmongering Vaccine Stories Go Viral Online
Stay up-to-date on Michigan's covid-19 spike