Leading scientists urge Facebook, Twitter and Google to crack down on ‘dangerous’ anti-vaxx content and say governments should require jabs by law
- Experts from universities in the US and UK worked together to publish a warning
- They said anti-vaccine beliefs are a ‘dangerous and wholly unnecessary crisis’
- Governments should require children to be vaccinated by law, they said
Internet search engines and social media websites must try harder to stop anti-vaccination claims circulating online.
More than a dozen global health experts have penned an article calling for bigger efforts to stop the spread of anti-vaxx myths.
Companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter should monitor claims vaccines don’t work in the same way they do violent or threatening messages and pornographic material, the team said.
They called the online spread of untrue information an ‘unnecessary crisis’ and added governments should force people to have their children immunised.
Leading health experts said the US and 34 countries in Europe now don’t have enough people vaccinated against measles to provide protection for the general population and stop outbreaks from happening (stock image)
Professors from Harvard, UCLA, Yale, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Southampton University were among those who wrote the piece.
They said governments should enforce mandatory vaccination programmes and other professionals should regularly put out accurate information.
The World Health Organization this year listed ‘vaccine hesitancy’ as one of the top 10 threats to human health around the world.
This put it in the same danger category as Ebola, Dengue fever, HIV, cancer and air pollution.
‘This is a man-made, dangerous and wholly unnecessary crisis,’ said Dr Scott Ratzan, a Columbia University professor and medical journal editor.
‘We intend to keep up a steady drumbeat of accurate vaccine communications until the traditional public consensus in support of childhood immunization is restored.’
Dr Ratzan and colleagues from the International Working Group (IWG) on Vaccination and Public Health Solutions warned the US and 34 countries in Europe – they didn’t name which – don’t have enough people immunised against measles to protect the general population and stop outbreaks happening.
In their Salzburg Statement on Vaccination Acceptance, the academics laid out targets for internet companies, governments, health professionals and parents.
They said major search engines and social media organisations should ‘develop principles that distinguish “levels of evidence” in the vaccine information they provide so that they can improve identification of disproven/inaccurate false claims about vaccine safety… just as they do for sexually explicit, violent and threatening messages’.
The paper said unscientific misinformation puts babies and cancer patients at avoidable risk of disability and death.
It added governments should ‘support laws that mandate childhood vaccination when they are likely to improve the public’s health’.
And they should ‘widely disseminate reliable, accurate vaccine information in plain language through mass and social media’.
Religious leaders, parents and even celebrities should be part of spreading this information, the group added.
Professor Lawrence Gostin, from Georgetown University in Washington DC, said parents don’t have the right to risk the lives or their or other people’s children.
‘The resurgence of potentially life-threatening diseases like measles… undermines the integrity of childhood protections that thousands of dedicated scientists, doctors, and public health officials spent the better part of the last century putting in place,’ he said.
‘Parents do have rights to make informed decisions about vaccinating their children, but they do not have the right to place their children, or other children, at risk of a serious infectious disease.
‘We need to do a far better job of reaching out to vaccine-hesitant parents.’
The team urged parents to get their information about vaccines from sources with solid scientific evidence and medical expertise, not ‘misinformation and unproven alternatives’.
And doctors and nurses should help by reassuring both parents and children that vaccines are safe, correcting any misconceptions people have.
The Salzburg statement was published in the Journal of Health Communication.