In the summer of 2023, I worked at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago conducting the National Immunization Survey. In this position I spent hours calling U.S. phones from Alaska to Guam asking for, among other things, personal opinions about vaccines. 

Andrew Wakefield, notorious for the claim that vaccines cause autism, had lost his medical license for fake research over thirteen years prior. Wouldn’t you think that the myth would be out the window?

Without sharing anything confidential, I’m going to let you know that this was not the case. Many Americans have nothing but vitriol to hurl at all kinds of vaccines as well as the Centers for Disease Control. 

Vaccine hesitancy is defined by the World Health Organization as a “delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccination despite availability of vaccination services.” It was cited by them as one of the ten most notable global health threats in 2019. WHO also stated that vaccines prevent two to three million deaths per year, a number that could be raised by 1.5 million “if global coverage of vaccinations improved.” 

This article is not an attack on your grandma or anyone out there who simply refuses to get vaccines, and I am not discrediting the multitude of reasons why individuals don’t feel comfortable getting vaccinated. 

Even the huge amount of  people who refuse to get vaccinated due to misinformation should not be blamed. Someone out there didn’t know what they didn’t know,  relied on peripheral cues, saw a headline that set off alarms in their heads and they shared it on Facebook. It happens. 

Now there are of course fact-checks and other preventative measures for the spread of misinformation, but these efforts are challenged by many factors including a lack of trust for scientific research, which is often proliferated by politicians and other media influencers. It would be difficult to believe science if someone who has won your trust with their charisma, confidence, and the comfortable familiarity of their speech patterns tells you that scientists are trying to manipulate you with their complicated jargon. 

In this day and age, who do you trust? I believe our attempts at answering this question have polarized and wounded us deeply as a nation. 

What’s more is that certain platforms are constructed in ways that promote engagement without paying mind to research on disinformation. For example , when Elon Musk bought Twitter he put an abrupt halt to efforts toward content moderation, opting instead for a system that allows people to submit their own fact checks to Twitter. This allows Twitter to have the final say on whether to approve or reject those fact checks. 

If a fact check is approved, it is then displayed as a footnote on the tweet, instead of the tweet getting deleted. This means that misinformation can spread on Twitter even when it has been verified as false. 

The greed of the few who have benefitted from this polarization has divided us so deeply that many Americans walk around believing that scientists and professors are the ones out to hurt them rather than politicians, billionaires and corporations. This is why science and health communication is so challenging, and why we need a new incentive to not spread misinformation in the first place.

I believe that Andrew Wakefield should be behind bars, and that anyone involved in fabricating false vaccine information and broadcasting it to the masses should have some amount of legal accountability when an epidemic breaks out because people were scared that their kid would be hurt by the vaccine. 

Even if a person’s death can be traced to  “natural causes” forensically, someone may well be responsible, and that person, organization, or corporation should be held accountable for their actions.