By Madalitso Wills Kateta:
Two women are arguing in the remote community of Kalang’oma on the outskirts of Lilongwe. Caroline Banda and Ellen Phiri have opposing views on the relevance of Covid vaccination.
Phiri, the vocal one, claims that Covid immunisation is a western plot to sterilise African women in order to manage the continent’s population. She also claims that Covid immunisation is no longer necessary because the disease is no longer considered as a public health threat.
“I saw a message on a WhatsApp group to the effect that Covid vaccines are a conspiracy by the West to control the African population,” Phiri claims.
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“Did you check the credibility of the expert and the channel where the information came from?” Banda, who also has strong information on Covid and vaccination, responds.
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These are, typically, conversations sparked by social media distortion and misinformation about Covid and its vaccines. Because of its ease of usage, social media has been exploited by various anti-vaccine groups to sway negative public opinion about Covid immunisation.
A 2022 study on health and science-related disinformation on Covid by the University of Navarra in Spain discovered that scientific knowledge— whether rigorous or not— played a significant impact in molding Covid hoaxes.
Researchers studied content hoaxes detected by fact-checkers in Spain
“A wide range of hoaxes based on scientific knowledge were created and contributed significantly to public misinformation during the pandemic,” said the researchers.
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The findings, published in the research journal PLOS ONE, shed light into how disinformation can affect vaccination efforts.
“We classified them (the hoaxes) into four categories based on their relationship to scientific knowledge: hasty science, decontextualised science, poorly interpreted science, and falsehood without a scientific basis,” the researchers say.
According to the researchers, “this typology can serve as a preliminary framework for future research and can aid in the development of systems for automated detection of health and science-related hoaxes”.
They emphasised that hoaxes have a genuine scientific basis, with varied degrees of rigour, and that leveraging real or faked sources was frequently used to give the hoax epistemic legitimacy and credibility.
“Occasionally, the origin was a low-quality scientific publication, either in preprint format or as a peer-reviewed article in a prestigious journal,” they explained.
According to Dingani Mithi, project officer at JournAids Malawi, misinformation and deception about Covid vaccinations has hampered the vaccination campaign drive in Malawi and many other poor and middle-income countries.
Mithi claims that, despite having a consistent supply of Covid vaccines, Malawi has failed to reach its target immunised population due to social media misrepresentation.
He is quick to point out that his organisation is enabling the media to combat disinformation by hosting media science cafes, where journalists get factual information on Covid and its vaccines.
“These cafes address various issues associated with Covid, such as the social impact, vaccine hesitancy and how the media can debunk misinformation about the disease,” he explains.
He states that the media science cafes, which are a collaboration between JournAids and AVAC, a US-based worldwide advocacy organisation working on HIV and other diseases, aim to boost science communication and reporting on HIV and other diseases.
According to Victor Palichina, health systems manager and senior pharmacy technician at the UNC Project, George Joaki Centre, the media can aid in the debunking of Covid vaccination misinformation by referring vaccine hoaxes to professionals.
“Some hoaxes may appear true to people who are not in the public health system and the best thing a journalist can do to debug such misinformation is to seek expert opinion from public health experts,” Palichina said at a recent media science cafe in Lilongwe.
Meanwhile, Ministry of Health spokesperson Adrian Chikumbe has said healthcare workers have been trying their best to dispel lies about Covid and other vaccines, such that gains are being registered.
“Otherwise, misinformation and myths about Covid vaccines frustrate efforts to protect the population from Covid,” Chikumbe explains.
Maybe the ministry has been neglecting one medium is such a campaign: Social media.
