“The role of social media in fueling the spread of vaccine hesitancy, and the increasingly well-documented health consequences, cannot be overemphasized,” write three medical and epidemiology researchers in a search published on July 7 by the New England Journal of Medicine.
And the starting point of their article is not the series of concerns of the last two years regarding the vaccine against COVID, but the series of concerns regarding the one against the H1N1 flu, in 2009. They recall that already, at that time, a meeting of the World Health Organization had warned that ” lack of public trust in vaccines risks undermining the political will needed to respond quickly to a more severe influenza pandemic in the future. »
It is normal, the three authors first recall, that each vaccination campaign is accompanied by ups and downs in periods of indecision: the “peaks” can be fueled by an unexpected event in the news, a report , a misguided statement by a politician, a loud extremist group, etc.
But what is less normal is the acceleration of these ups and downs since the early 1990s, an acceleration that they associate with the arrival of the Internet and, in the last 10 years, to social media. This paradigm shift requires, they write, adjustments in the ways of communicating and responding to concerns about vaccines: “Vaccine acceptance can be increased, but responding to emerging concerns is key.”
Hesitation, they remind, should not be confused with anti-vaccination: “The period of hesitation and indecision is a time of vulnerability, as well as opportunity. Feelings about whether or not to get vaccinated can change, and change more than once, as multiple surveys have shown. »
We must therefore be attentive to these “emerging concerns”, and to do so, we must follow their evolution. It’s one of the projects the paper’s first author, anthropologist Heidi Larson, who is founding director of the Vaccine Confidence Project, is working on. We also owe him a popular book with a revealing title, Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start and Why They Don’t Go Away (2020).
Social media having the qualities of its faults, it can be this place to collect data in real time. Experiments in this direction have been underway since the start of the pandemic, in particular on Facebook et Twitter. Although the users of these platforms are not necessarily representative of the population, the first data collected goes in the same direction as the surveys carried out on these subjects. And above all, “the large volume of data on vaccine hesitancy” thus collected provides something unprecedented: a geographical map of vaccine hesitancy across the United States. What to think of responses to these “emerging concerns”, but of responses that, in addition, would be adjusted regionally, using local or community resources – such as several recommended it during the pandemic.
This will be all the more important in the future as, “considering the changing and dynamic nature of vaccine hesitancy”, “keeping the conversation open will be essential to identify these emerging concerns early”.