In her work at hospitals or in-home healthcare, Parker explained she has often talked to patients about the importance of vaccines. Some listen. Many don’t.
While Parker has seen plenty of misinformation and disinformation over the years, she said the COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse.
“There was a petri dish there just waiting for that mess to proliferate,” she said in reference to vaccine scepticism.
“And then the right wind came along, and it blew those spores all over the place: the spores of ignorance and misinformation.”
Rekha Lakshmanan observed something similar. She is the chief strategic officer for The Immunization Partnership, a Houston-based nonprofit that aims to eradicate preventable diseases.
She argued that Texas has long been a site of vaccine misinformation. But the pandemic “made the nation catch up with Texas”.
False rumours flooded the internet, warning that vaccines could alter DNA or render people infertile. Some conspiracy theories even posited that the vaccine could be used for implanting chips into patients’ bodies for surveillance.
Not all vaccine sceptics believe the misinformation. The way Lakshmanan sees it, vaccine hesitancy falls on a continuum. At the far end, there are those who cannot be convinced to get a vaccine, regardless of the data you present. Unfortunately, she said, that’s the loudest group.
Yet, others can be convinced.
“You have to take a step back and see that there’s a bigger part of that continuum that’s parents, and they just have questions,” Lakshmanan said.
She explained that parents are often sifting through reams of misinformation, trying to understand what is real and what isn’t.
For example, the anti-vaccine organisation Children’s Health Defense recently published a website that bore a striking resemblance to materials published by the CDC.
But its site was riddled with disinformation about vaccines. Kennedy, who served as a leader at Children’s Health Defense before joining the government, ultimately ordered the organisation to take the site down.
“The challenge with misinformation is that it could look legit,” Lakshmanan said, “which is why we have to approach these conversations with empathy.”
That includes arguments about “parents’ rights”, which she says is entirely misleading. Anti-vaccine leaders like Kennedy have accused the government of forcing vaccination on parents.
“No one has ever said we should take away parents’ rights,” Lakshmanan told Al Jazeera. “It’s a red herring.”