podcast part utmone

The transcript discusses the topic of vaccines, autism, and the media's role in the anti-vax movement. It explains that vaccines have revolutionized healthcare, but have also faced myths, especially the link to autism. The media's mishandling of this topic has led to misinformation and vaccine hesitancy. The transcript also mentions the origin of the vaccine-autism myth, which was a study published in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield, later retracted, but already causing damage. Social media platforms like Reddit and Facebook have become breeding grounds for misinformation and distorted scientific findings. This has led to a surge in measles cases and a significant percentage of individuals expressing reluctance to vaccinate, especially against COVID. The lack of effective strategies to counteract mass ignorance is also highlighted. Okay, last but not least, you guys, you okay? Okay, so, hi everyone. My topic is titled Get Vaxxed. Ooh, I love it. And it's about vaccines, autism, and the media's role in the anti-vax movement. Now, this is kind of straightforward. I mean, we can all attest to how this topic has become a lot more important nowadays, post-pandemic and such, you know? But I chose it because I had heard of it in class, and I was very fascinated by its origin story. It literally blew my mind. I remember sitting there, and I was like, there's no way, like, there's no way. But there is way, and that is what we're gonna talk about here. And also, I'm very interested in medicine, medicine-related topics and such, so this is, like, very perfect for me. So, first, I'm gonna introduce the topic a little bit, give a little bit of background info. Okay, so, vaccines, as we know, have revolutionized healthcare since their creation. According to Raffoli, they've not only saved millions of lives, but they've also significantly extended life expectancy, especially in Western societies. However, alongside their successes, vaccines have also endured a lot of myths, especially the most famous one right now being their supposed relation to autism. However, let me start by saying that's not true, no. So, to give a disclaimer, to give a little bit of a background information on autism, autism spectrum disorder, a complex neurodevelopmental condition, has intrigued scientists for decades, but it's actually fairly recent. It was first documented by Leo Kanner in 1943. 1943, okay, 20th century. It remains also very much unrecorded, and there's not a lot of research going on about it. Misconceptions persist about this condition, right, and it just fuels vaccine hesitancy because there's a lack of research on this. It's also important to note, now, for the real disclaimer, autism's cause has not been properly identified, although studies have shown that there is a genetic component, likely caused by mutations, but it's not really because of environmental factors after birth, so, you know. Okay, yeah. You know, probably just genetics. Probably just genetics, but again, there's still a lot of research to be done, but we'll get into that in a bit, right? Okay, so, unfortunately, the media used this undeniable sway over the public to harm the reputation of vaccines, and its handling of the vaccine autism myth has been failed with misinformation. There's been sensationalist headlines, like, you've all read this whole thing, on, like, Daily Mail, like. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The measles vaccine paralyzed my daughter. No, stuff like that. Especially with COVID. Especially with COVID. I don't know if you guys saw, but, like, on Twitter, I remember, like, I don't, this was probably, like, peak pandemic. There was this video of this lady who was, like, apparently, after she got the COVID vaccine, she, like, developed some, like, disorder where she was constantly, like, she was, like, her legs would always shake, and, like, she couldn't even stand or whatever, but, like, everyone could tell she was, like, faking it, because it's, like, it just did not seem, like, okay, I can't, I can't attest to if it was real or not. I can't remember if someone debunked it or something. I'm pretty sure it was debunked, but it was just very, like, sensationalized. Like, this lady was, like, obviously trying to spread misinformation, and then it was, like, everyone's, like, there's no, like, link to, like, COVID causing you to, like, have, like, like, shaky, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, there's no proof, but on Twitter, you go on, oh, my God, Twitter during the pandemic was actually fake. Twitter during the pandemic was real, and I'm very glad you brought up that whole thing about COVID because that's also something we're going to address today. Vaccine hesitancy became a major issue during the pandemic, and it still is, of course. Surveys revealed, actually, a very concerning trend. It's predictable, but whatever, with a significant percentage of individuals expressing their reluctance to vaccinate, particularly against COVID, and this was done, like, during the pandemic, so you would think, you know, in an ideal world, one would think the survey would have shown, oh, I'm totally getting vaccinated. No, no, no, no, indeed. So this takes us to the questions that I tried to address in this work. First of all, what was the origin of the misconception that vaccines cause autism? And also, how did the media's miscommunication regarding the topic lead to an overall worsened perspective on vaccines? So we're going to dive into the history, trace the myth's roots, and the pivotal role played by miscommunication in perpetuating it. We're also going to highlight the lack of effective strategies to counteract mass ignorance. Okay, so for our next segment, I'm going to talk about the origin of the myth. So first of all, tell me your guesses on how vaccines originally got linked to autism. You may already know about it. I don't care. I don't care. Tell me your guesses. I honestly don't know. Yeah, I'm trying to think. Was it like, maybe like there was a case where like some child at birth did present like typical traits of autism and then got their vaccination and the parents, like the child grew and then the parents were like, and then that's how that happened? That's not it. I think so too. Like maybe just like it happening in one person and everyone just kind of catching up. I mean, probably someone saw that because it eventually led to an article being published surrounding that topic. So in 1998, the Lancet, a famous medical journal, published a study done by Andrew Wakefield. Not shout out to him, we hate that guy. I don't know if he's still alive, but if you're out there and you're listening, we don't like you. And he claimed the link between MMR vaccines and autism. Now, shockingly, the study only involved 12 children, which as women in STEM, we know is unacceptable, right? It's not a good enough sample pool. Tiny sample, very tiny sample. And it basically concluded that, oh my God, my child got autism from vaccines, right? It said that it basically caused it, but it was just a very, no. Now, later on, that article was retracted, but the damage was already done. So the media frenzy that happened after that fueled a lot of fear and skepticism among parents, especially. And it actually led to a surge in measles cases because people started getting scared to vaccinate their children, right? So in the UK, 12,000 cases were reported two decades after the study was published. And the U.S. saw 2,216 cases since 2000. So there was definitely like a direct. It's also like a thing going right now where there's like a few new cases popping up here too. We're also gonna talk about, there was also a bunch of preventable deaths that could have happened in COVID, right? But whatever, not whatever, bad. But okay, so enter the era of social media. It just became a breeding ground for misinformation. So you may have heard of celebrities like Jim McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and even political figures like Donald Trump have, no, I know, have condemned vaccines and just fueled a lot of hatred towards that. And actually, fun fact, not so fun. Studies have shown that there was a disparity in vaccination rates among Republicans in the U.S., so guess who their leader is, you know? I'm not surprised. I know. So now we're going to go on to our next segment, miscommunication in the media. It thrives a lot in online forums where users engage in impassioned debates on vaccines and autism. So can anyone guess what the main forum is? Reddit? Reddit! Well, unfortunately. So take for instance, there is this one post I found claiming that a pro-vaccine expert confirmed a vaccine autism link. It has like over 2,000 comments under it. Now, where was it found under, you may ask? R slash. R slash conspiracy. Of course. I know. It was just this whole thing that claimed the whole causation of vaccines autism, the link to that, was heavy metals poisoning by the vaccines, and it cited a scientific article. However, the Reddit user obviously just cherry-picked a bunch of information from the article, and it just, when you actually read the article, it proved absolutely nothing. It was about babies and heavy metals poisoning, and how that was a danger for babies. But like, honestly, no, no, no, no, no. Like, what do you expect? In my opinion, I was talking about Reddit like being a breeding ground for pseudo-scientific information. Pseudo-science, right there. Pseudo-science, indeed. It also, just a bunch of cherry-picking. Like, you pick out the facts that apply to your topic. The Reddit commenter is just one of the many examples of a broader trend in distorting scientific findings to fit their own standards, to fit their beliefs, but it contributes to the misinformation, of course. Now, there's another social media site, Facebook. Oh. Uh-huh, maybe the reactions, just like that. There's obviously an overwhelming amount of evidence that supports the effectiveness of vaccines, but they're constantly under attack on social media, like on Facebook, a lot, especially. Now, studies have been conducted by Polish researchers, and it also shows that since the accessibility of social media is so prevalent, like anti-vax hesitancy has spread to other countries as well. So, Poland, Italy, the USA, especially, right? Facebook ignorance knows no borders, right? It's like the boomer central. Facebook is the boomer central. And boomers, not to generalize, but boomers are the most, I feel like the loudest anti-vax. Yeah, and you know what? It lines up, because the whole vaccine autism link was first done in 1998, and that was very recent. And now, all of the people who grew up to have children were exactly the generation who grew up with those types of headlines and the media frenzy that followed afterwards, you know? And now, those people are on Facebook, so. No, but that's so interesting, because I feel like the boomer generation, I don't know if it's boomers or the generation before, but I remember the polio vaccine. That was a huge thing, everywhere. Polio was a huge problem, and then when they got everyone vaccinated, they kind of eradicated that problem. So, it's so interesting that a generation that was so benefited by a certain vaccine is now so lousy, being like, vaccines are bad. Like, that's crazy to me. Like, there was vaccine hesitancy, of course, before the Wakefield article, but. But not to the extent that it is now. No, it boomed after that. So, I will now highlight that there's a huge need for research, which you would think the opposite. No, no, no, no. So, since Wakefield's article, resources meant for understanding autism instead shifted to disproving vaccine links, right? And Monokin's book, Noken, Mnokin, I'm so sorry. His book, The Panic Virus, shout out to The Panic Virus, a very informational book. I probably will summarize the topic a lot better than I could. It reveals how organizations treated autism as quote, unquote, curable, right? With some blaming vaccines. There's actually a case study that I did during my literature review funded by Safe Minds, which is an anti-vax organization that quote, aims to solve the autism epidemic, unquote. Epidemic, like no. Anyways, the study wanted to prove that vaccines cause autism, and unfortunately for their investors, there was no link found, obviously, like at all. And aside from the study, there's been a huge lack of prevalent research done in the last decade, which poses an issue in a post-pandemic world where vaccination matters above everything. Now, researchers have highlighted the importance of continuing to study pro-vaccine messages and how they can effectively be communicated, but that's as far as it goes, mostly. Like, they're like, we should continue. Raise importance. Right. Woo, right? So there's like not a lot. Now, there is, though, one silver lining that came with the pandemic. Anti-vax views linked to autism were deemed ableist, and more people are becoming aware of the lack of proof behind it on social media, which, you know, social media working for once, for the correct side. Now, I also did kind of a second literature review, right? I know there's like a long paper trail of this issue, right? So I looked at news coverage, I looked at research reports and articles, journal articles from databases like you mentioned, like JSTOR, love, and also like a bunch of media posts and non-scientific sources like Reddit or Facebook. Now, I chose these because most of the history and ongoing debates on this topic are online. So they go beyond the published articles, the peer-reviewed articles, and the studies conducted on vaccines, which are also relevant, and I also highlighted here in my research paper, but I also wanted to look at the organic conversations about vaccine hesitancy, which are found on like forums and news coverage, stuff like that. So I found three overall trends that I found from my research findings in relation to my question. So first, unsurprisingly, the media has a trend of blowing scientific findings out of proportion and therefore cause misinformation. And this has happened since the beginning. So like I mentioned, a bunch of misleading headlines, right? And, but especially there's a lot of platforms given to anti-vax, anti-vax figures. So like even Oprah was like allowed to invite anti-vaxxers to her show to hear out both sides. Oh my God, really? I know, Oprah. Oprah? I know. Oprah, how are you doing, Oprah? I know, like people give them a lot of attention and they give them this platform, which should not be happening. No, I think it's just because it's like a way to like sensationalize. Exactly. And like get people's attention. I know, like the Reddit users, like they're like, wow. Yeah. It's big pharma. I remember reading that comment and they were like, oh yeah, big pharma wants to control us with the vaccines. They want to like implant this. And like, no, it just doesn't make any sense. Right. It gives these people a platform. And once they, once these types of discussions get big enough, they start being covered on news outlets and such, which just gives them more traffic. And it's just like, no, right? No one is checking these people. Second, social media has become a place where news related to vaccines and autism are discussed under quote unquote conspiracy groups. And it acts as a modern continuation to the original print sites that originally spread this information. So like I mentioned, Reddit and Facebook, you would think that this has stopped, especially among our generation, right? Because we're more like, I guess, aware of this misinformation, but actually a study reported that while this awareness of fake news is high among Gen Z and millennials, less than a quarter choose to report false information. Oh, that's true. That is true. That is true. You read it. You're like, wow, you guys are so stupid. Anyways. Yeah. I guess it's because like, we don't feel like we could do anything. I know. I've never actually thought about like, oh, if I see something false, I just see it and I'm like, I've never seen something fake. Come on and party. Okay, no. But yeah, now you, if you're out there and you see someone spreading misinformation, try not to engage and simply just be like, just report it. Yeah. Just do something about it, you know? Finally, vaccine hesitancy has directly, like directly caused mass death, disease, and discrimination. So previously mentioned were the reported cases of measles in the UK and the US after the Lakefield publication. However, there have also been reports of the amount of preventable deaths that happened during COVID due to a lack of vaccination. Now, one study estimated that 232,000 deaths among adults in the US could have been prevented if they had at least received the first dose. Oh my God. That's a huge number. And that was only during the pandemic, like first dose time. So this number could have very well increased. Yeah. Yeah. So I know. There was also an increase in discrimination towards individuals with autism as a result of this vaccine autism myth. Think of how many people are not taken seriously nowadays because their families are claiming that their autism was the product of medicine. Oh God. And not just something that they were born with. And instead of trying to understand, they're like, no, no, like the vaccines are the enemy. Right? So several ableist organizations were founded under the pretense of like, curing autism. Oh my God. Yeah, autism neeks. Autism speaks in these. Oh my God. And they blame vaccine for a condition that has no proven link. So let me publicly call out, right? For all the four listeners of this podcast, right? Some of the names of the anti-vaxxers. Safe Minds, Autism Speak, Autism One, Cure Autism Now, Defeat Autism Now, which seems- Oh, so many. So many. I know. Generation Rescue, which was created by Jenny McCarthy, National Vaccine Information Center, and Talk About Curing Autism. I hate you all. Now, these results show a very complex and incredibly deep-rooted belief that vaccines cause autism and harm. And this belief was only spread by the media and enhanced by social media. So to answer the research question, the origin of a link between vaccines and autism can be traced back to 1998. And there was a large boom because of that in vaccine hesitancy. Now, this attitude became more extreme because the possibility of vaccines causing a neurological condition opened up. And fear isn't something that can be soothed. So this leads us to the second part of the question, which considers the media's role in miscommunication. And we can conclude that it's completely, the media is completely responsible for the spread of misinformation since it intentionally caused doubt in vaccines and gave a platform to those who spoke about their alleged dangers, right? Social media is just an extension of that. But hope is not lost. Hopefully. There can still, something can still be done. So simply providing facts about vaccination can cause even more hesitancy and have been proven ineffective. One solution is to enhance and spread the implementation of motivational interviewing as proposed by Gagneux. Gagneux? In 2020. So this technique entails providing workshops and personalized discussions between healthcare providers and parents regarding vaccines. So this was implemented first in Quebec, in all maternity wards in Quebec, and it reportedly reduced vaccine hesitancy by 40%. Very significant, right? It's under the name PromoVac. And you know what? Slay for the Quebecois. Slay for the Quebecois. Now, another strategy is to prioritize enhancing trust in vaccines in younger generations. So anti-vaccine misinformation can be contained and reduced for the future generation, right? For our children. To do this, there must be an increase in reaching out to community leaders and people with influences among these generations. So you can follow the example of President Biden in the US and how he invited Olivia Rodrigo, the singer, right, to the White House, and she encouraged young people to vaccinate against COVID. Now, governments can also do more by implementing programs similar to PromoVac in schools, right? Students can have educational discussions that actually address their fears by their community leaders, right? Because these are people they trust. And if these people are collabing, collabing with scientific experts in encouraging vaccination, encouraging their own health, you know, it would help. Very practical. Yeah, very smart. And a final suggestion is to increase scrutiny on anti-vax and ableist organizations. Now, repeating an earlier point, giving a platform to these people has increased their funding most of all, and it has diverted attention from potential breakthroughs in autism research. So governments, public figures, major media outlets, even people like ourselves, like students, anyone with social media, they should report these organizations. They should scrutinize. They should, like, literally cause hate and show them how their views are extremely downfall. Be a hater. Downfall, harmful. Be a hater to the people who deserve it. So we can conclude that it's important to discuss the origins of misconceptions and how to combat these damages caused by media, social media, et cetera. The scientific community, along with the public, has to recognize how the vaccine-autism link has impacted these people with autism and how debating this, like, non-existent proof has taken away necessary attention towards their research, right? People who are working to understand autism, to further vaccine research, et cetera. It's just led to a lot of vaccine hesitancy. Giving more attention just continues the cycle, so stay informed, everybody, like, now. Any questions? I do, yes. So I had a question about your solution. Do you think that the solutions that you've proposed could be implemented worldwide? What can people do to increase awareness? Okay, I think in an ideal world, they could be implemented worldwide, but not everyone, unfortunately, is open to vaccines nowadays, and there are a lot of bureaucratic and political barriers that this has to go through, but for now, I would encourage listeners or people to push their local leaders to spread vaccine education in their area, right? It might take some time, but hopefully one day, vaccines won't be linked to autism. Hopefully one day, people will be like, oh, that's kind of a crazy connection. I don't know how that happened, you know? Because they are now educated on this subject, and maybe one day, people will choose education, but for now, I don't think, unfortunately, due to a lot of barriers, it could be implemented worldwide, but, you know, you can start regionally, like you mentioned, yeah, you know? Anyway, next question. I had a question as well. So why do you think people are so passionate about the subject? Like, why does it keep growing and festering and getting worse without it being addressed? Okay, well, first of all, the whole social media thing, it allows conversations to grow, but I also think it has to do with the psychology of fear. A lot of people think that fixing vaccine hesitancy is just like throwing facts at them, like being like, no, you're wrong, but people who are so utterly convinced that their son got autism from a COVID vaccine will not listen. They're not gonna listen. It goes like in one ear, out the other, right? That's why I think motivational interviewing, the one solution that I mentioned, is such a huge step, because it opened an opportunity for these defenses to come down, and through a genuine discussion and education about science, people started to listen. So if you're on the fence about vaccines and are open to learning, I encourage you to do your own research, right, on the origins of vaccines, on vaccine facts, and why they're beneficial, and keep an open mind and be open to education itself. Have you ever wanted to get into fights and discussions with strangers online? Do you have strong opinions, possibly relating to vaccines, COVID, and autism, that you wanna share with others? Well, you're in luck. Download social media today. Take your pick from the prime specimens that we have, Facebook for our older generations, Reddit for the inquisitive mind, or Instagram for the passive-aggressive political stories. Join the discussion today and learn to question your government.