'Disinformation Dozen' & anti-vaxxers
If you thought the news of bpTT's 15 per cent shortfall this year (ten per cent till 2024) was rough news topping unemployment and our already shaky economy, think again. It gets worse. This week, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (US) circulated a document saying "the war has changed." The Delta variant, it claims, is "more transmissible than viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu and smallpox, and as contagious as chickenpox." (New York Times)
Based on an IMF report, the Guardian (UK) has declared that "poorer countries are less fortunate, as their vaccine programmes lag well behind those in advanced countries. The world is now two blocs: better-off countries who look forward to life returning to normal while unvaccinated developing countries face rising infection and death rates."
The World Bank echoes this claiming "fragile economies" with low vaccination rates (ours is still just 20 per cent) have been set back by at least a decade by the pandemic.
Vaccinations changed everything for China: 40 per cent of 1.3 billion people vaxxed; The US: 60 per cent of 328 million people vaxxed; The UK: 88-90 per cent of 66 million people vaxxed. Their economies are bouncing back, with the US and China poised to make up a quarter of the growth in 2021. (BBC).
In T&T, with the availability of vaccines nationwide in mass vaccination centres without appointments, we can get back on our feet, like the US, China, UK and other parts of the world.
Our hurdle: anti-vaxxers.
Anti-vaxxers, here (like everywhere) who attack vaccination with zeal fervently believe (with blind absolute faith usually reserved only for God) in a global conspiracy against them, involving media, governments, medical practitioners, scientists, big pharma, and the Devil, which combined will use the vaccine to put chips in people, to track, magnetise, sterilise, kill, control, turn them into horses, mark people with the Devil using "an experimental" vaccine.
I tried to understand why anti-vaxxers are immune to images of funeral pyres in India, the mass graves in Italy, the dead on the streets of Brazil; resistant to the stories of anti-vaxxers on ventilators, dying and begging people to vaccinate.
The picture that emerges of anti-vaxxers is a mass of dispossessed people consistently robbed of agency; angry people (explaining online abuse) deprived of good governance, secure jobs, health care and education, security.
Anti-vaxxers protest isn't against a COVID vaccine but about fear, mistrust (understandable) and rage against the authorities so intense they would rather die of COVID than comply with a government they believe has failed them. They don't fear the jab. They fear authority and governments.
More treacherously, educated power-hungry entitled people are also leveraging vaccine hesitancy to create dissent and unrest by feeding fear and conspiracy theories to bid for populist power.
Take Opposition leader Persad-Bissessar who says the sun cures COVID, and Dr Fuad Khan who likens citizens vaccine compliance with Nazi Germany. They are playing politics with lives. Not dissimilar to counties like the UK, US and Canada, who by hoarding certain vaccines and banning other WHO-approved vaccines are using developing countries in a nasty post-colonial trade war with India and China.
Ask anti-vaxxers for a source for their bizarre claims (see above) and they will rudely say they are "not your slave", they "don't have time" and tell you "do your research" or call you names. The truth is they don't know.
I checked.
In March 2021, The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) (a non-profit and non-governmental organisation) unveiled 12 online personalities–the 'disinformation dozen' who have a combined following of 59 million people across all online platforms–but mostly Facebook. The CCDH reports the 'disinformation dozen' don't have "relevant medical expertise" but ‘line’ their pockets with their products claiming to cure the virus.
The 12 influencers spread misinformation about vaccine safety while downplaying the danger of the pandemic. The 'disinformation dozen' include physicians practicing pseudoscience, a bodybuilder, a wellness blogger, a religious zealot, and, notably, Robert F Kennedy Jr, John F Kennedy's nephew. Kennedy links vaccines to autism and 5G broadband cellular networks to the coronavirus pandemic. Kennedy was removed from Instagram but not Facebook.
For the conspiracy theorists to find so much easy fuel to their fire of disinformation, governments globally must reflect on how badly they have let down their people, that the gap in government support is filled by a dozen self-serving crooks. Now more than ever, governments must reach out to their dispossessed and angry citizens and give them hope. Our lives depend on it.