On the subject of vaccines, the comments on the Internet are more convincing

The recent outbreak of measles in the United States has sparked fierce debate about the benefits and dangers of vaccination.

The Internet has become the main arena for this debate, so the authors of the new study decided to examine in detail the reactions of users in the Internet discussion and their influence on decision-making about the implementation of vaccination.

The Ministry of Health and Social Policy of the USA /United States Department of Health and Human Services, HHS/ quite actively and qualitatively conducts explanatory campaigns to clarify the issues regarding the implementation of vaccine prophylaxis.

Web pages with detailed information, research data, and medical statistics are being created for this purpose, yet there still remains a group of people who actively oppose the vaccination method.

For comparison, in Bulgaria, the Ministry of Health is not so active and the responsible institutions are not so active in the online space, and perhaps that is why there are more people opposed to vaccination, mainly parents and especially mothers.

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For Bulgaria, there are no data on which vaccines are most often refused by parents.

But in the US, most oppose measles immunization with the combined vaccine known as MMR, PRIORIX is administered in our country.

Opponents of vaccination fear that their child may develop autism as a result of the trivaccine and recall that their right to refuse vaccination is guaranteed by international human rights conventions.

But where do these 2 camps / parents for and against vaccines / get their information on these issues? What impact do government awareness campaigns and official websites such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention /CDC web page have?

For comparison, a quick check on the websites of the Ministry of Health, the National Center for Public Health and Analyzes and the Regional Health Inspections of the three largest cities in Bulgaria shows that information about vaccines is too scarce and limited only to the immunization calendar.

It follows that in Bulgaria there are even greater grounds for doubt regarding vaccines compared to the USA, as the official institutions responsible for this activity limit themselves to only making statements on TV media.

Should parents trust the information published on the web pages of official institutions more than the opinions of other mothers and the Internet comments of parents?

Are official health authorities up to the task of convincing parents of their right? . In the USA, official health institutions are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which can conditionally be compared to the regional health inspectorates in Bulgaria.

To answer these questions, Washington State University scientists conducted 2 experiments. They published the results of their research in the Journal of Advertising.

In the first experiment, 129 participants watched 2 fictional social ads – one video calling for vaccination – advertised as being released by the CDC, and the second containing calls to refuse vaccination – advertised as being released by National Vaccination Harm Information Site.

2 public videos were edited as realistically as possible and placed on 2 sites – doubles. As well as under the real videos on this topic, under these false ones were left /fake/ user comments, some of which were against vaccines and some of which were for them.

The authors found that for the participants, the official information and that of consumers with undetermined competence on vaccine prevention issues – were equally “persuasive”.

Ioannis Kareklas – the head of the research points out: “The comments of random users were about the participants, even more convincing than the official information, and that surprised us a lot”