What combats Vax Skepticism?

Robert Pease (host) 

Hey there, Purple Principle headsets and earbuds and eardrums, Robert Pease here. 

Emily Crocetti (host) 

And Emily Crocetti. With just a quick note before the show starts to say we’ve launched a newsletter —The Purple Principle in Print. 

Robert Pease (host)  

Every two weeks, we will email you a carefully curated round-up of articles, issues, and more on the perils of political and social polarization. And those working to bridge the divide.

Emily Crocetti (host)  

It takes you beyond what you hear on the podcast, and gives us a chance to share the in-depth research I know you appreciate from The Purple Principle team.

Robert Pease (host) 

Not a simple thing, this polarization. Click the link in our show notes to subscribe.

[Archival audio collage, COVID vaccine skeptics]

Robert Pease (host) 

Even as vaccinations in the U.S. in bring down COVID cases and mortality numbers, there’s a lot of vaccine skepticism swirling around out there. This the Purple Principle, a podcast about the perils of polarization. I’m Robert Pease.

Emily Crocetti (host) 

And I’m Emily Crocetti. And, yes, thinking back to the onset of COVID, or looking at some less fortunate places in the world today, we are incredibly fortunate to have widespread access to vaccines right now in the U.S. I mean, just think back to one year ago.

[Archival audio, early COVID vaccine news]

Robert Pease (host)  

But that said, vaccination rates seem to be slowing. And there may be groups out there so firmly opposed to the vaccine that they prevent the nation, and other nations, from reaching herd immunity.

Emily Crocetti (host) 

No shortage of important questions on this episode. And a highly informed guest to help answer them. Dr. Jeanine Guidry is the Director of the Media and Health Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

This idea that we don’t trust expertise any more, especially in the intellectual realm – we need to do better at science communication. We need to train teachers better how to teach science and communication about science, because otherwise we’re going to keep coming back at this over and over again. And this costs lives. That’s my reason for being passionate about this. 

Robert Pease (host) 

We spoke with Dr. Guidry at length about the next great COVID related battle. Not so much fighting the virus itself. But fighting the viral misinformation about vaccination. 

Emily Crocetti (host) 

First, though, let’s get to know Dr. Jeanine Guidry, originally from Holland, Director of the cross-disciplinary Media and Health Lab at VCU, and probably not one of a huge number of health researchers who made one of their great discoveries on Pinterest. 

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

So I did my PhD at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. My PhD is in social and behavioral science, so it sits more on the behavioral science part, but done on a medical campus. My undergrad and my master’s degrees are in communication, health communication, communication in general. And I’ve always been really interested in the intersection of both. I think that the more integrated these are, the better it is. I’m a firm believer in interdisciplinarity. We face really, really huge issues in this world today, COVID-19 being obviously one of them. And I think that the more people from different parts of society and of science that we have at the table, the better. 

Robert Pease (host)

Was there a major moment in your life when you decided, you know, that’s for me, people need to know more about medical information?

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

Yeah, there was actually. I was six years old. My oldest brother is about 14 years old and I am I’m from the Netherlands – and he started medical school when I was about six and then quickly following, one of my sisters started nursing school and the other sister started nursing school. And so through my time of elementary, middle and high school, I was very aware of health. It was an early passion.

Robert Pease (host) 

Well, going back to your point about the importance of being interdisciplinary, can you tell us about that discovery you made on Pinterest a few years ago? 

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

It’s seven years ago now, and this was in my while I was in my PhD program. We were required to look at a social media platform and look at a health related issue and do a content analysis. I’m an avid social media user, have been for a long time, Pinterest being one of them. And I used Pinterest like the majority of people still use it: recipes, decorating ideas, make a tutorial. But I thought, I have never heard anyone talk about health issues on Pinterest. And I always had an interest in vaccines, since vaccines are one of the big public health triumphs over time. So I decided to look at Pinterest and see if there were vaccine related posts. And if so, how were they framed? How were people talking about those? And to my great surprise, I looked at a sample of 800 pins, randomly selected, and more than 75% of all those pins were strongly anti-vaccine. And number two, there was no representation of public health care providers in any way. These were individuals, people talking about vaccines and saying, “Oh, don’t do this. Don’t get the HPV for your child. Vaccines are not safe. Vaccines cause autism.” Basically what we’ve been seeing on other platforms as well, just amplified. And I wrote that paper up, I got it published. I sent it to Pinterest and I didn’t hear anything at that point. And in 2019, I was on a panel in D.C. about misinformation on social media. And I spoke on vaccines and misinformation. I talked about Pinterest a little bit, right after me was a Pinterest representative who spoke. And who said, “when we saw Dr. Guidry’s study back in 2014-2015, we started realizing we had to do something.” My paper was not the only one, but it was one of the pieces of information that made Pinterest take notice and say, we need to do something about this level of misinformation.

Emily Crocetti (host)

So what was it about Pinterest that allowed for the anti-vax spread of misinformation to crop up to begin with, and how did they try to go about reducing that?

Dr. Jeanine Guidry  

I don’t think there was necessarily anything all that unique about Pinterest. Pinterest is a social platform. People can post information, they can share information, they can consume information, and that’s the same thing. It happens on basically all social platforms. I do think that one of the things is that Pinterest still has a high percentage of female users. And a lot of those are moms, and moms still make a lot of the decisions, medically speaking, for families. And so if you have a situation where a population like that is talking about vaccines, the public health environment at that point really wasn’t aware of that. They were talking about vaccines. So there wasn’t a lot of intentionally posting correct information, participating, communicating, dialoguing. And then you combine that with an issue that – it’s known that vaccines have always come with a level of concern, especially with new vaccines. You get that. And that’s really sort of a little bit of a perfect storm. 

Robert Pease (host)

So then let’s jump ahead to another perfect storm, COVID. And we’re curious, with all that, when did you first hear or read about COVID, and what was your gut reaction at that first moment?

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

It was right around the beginning of 2020. I always had an interest in infectious diseases. So when I saw some news pop up that there appears to be a viral disease that we don’t know anything about in China that is coming up, I started looking at it, kept an eye on it. And then of course, news about COVID developed very, very quickly last year, but it was from the very beginning on. And I don’t think that anyone had an idea of exactly how big this would get.

Robert Pease (host)

Well, just about a year ago, we had an interview with a neuroscientist at NYU, Dr. Jay Van Bavel, who’s originally from Canada, and he commented that COVID wasn’t immediately politicized in Canada, which is a more of a multi-party system. 

Jay Van Bavel 

The interesting thing about that multi-party system is, if you decide that you don’t like the liberal party, you could vote for the new democratic party. And yet you still don’t have to vote for a party you dislike, whereas in the United States, it’s very much, if you don’t like your party, it feels like the other party is going to win because it’s a zero sum game of two teams.The other thing I will say is that Canada’s a really good case where the coronavirus didn’t have to get polarized. And so that ‘s a really interesting case where – and again, Canada is very close –  I have a lot of family in Canada and you have real political debates in Canada, don’t get me wrong. And many of them are similar to the United States, but this issue did not have to get polarized.

Robert Pease (host) 

Did you have the same impression coming from the Netherlands, which I assume is more of a multi-party system?

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

Yes, absolutely. I hold dual citizenship, and to me it’s been remarkable and sad how quickly not just COVID, but everything related to COVID, became polarized: wearing a mask, social distancing, vaccines. I mean, anything that we could use to prevent the virus from spreading became polarized almost as soon as it hit the floor running, so to speak. And while that’s happening, for example, in the Netherlands and Western Europe as well, it didn’t happen as quickly and as immediately, And if you have 26 political parties, like the Netherlands has maybe 23, something like that, that doesn’t mean there’s not extremes there, but it means for any type of government, you have to have a coalition. Well, that means that extreme things are going to just get discouraged a little bit sooner. I wish that things didn’t turn as polarized as quickly. And I am not seeing a lot of improvement now. The elections are past us, also next year, midterms…it’s a never ending cycle.

Robert Pease (host) 

Well not quite a never ending cycle, Emily. In terms of Purple Principle research, we did take one day off after the 2020 election before thinking about the 2022 primaries. 

Emily Crocetti (host) 

Yes, but that was only because of a little bit of confusion, and misinformation, about the election results. 

Robert Pease (host) 

Yup. Just a little bit. But we did have a well positioned previous guest speak to the topic of COVID and polarization during Season One a year ago, when the crisis was hitting full force. During his three terms in Congress Jason Altmire was rated as the most centrist member of the U.S. House.

Jason Altmire:

This is a great concern of mine as this national crisis has unfolded. I’ve been very concerned about this idea that it’s gotta be somebody else’s fault. That’s unfortunately very different from what it used to be in this country, where crises would bring people together. It would be the one unifying factor that was out there where people would put politics aside. It is exactly the opposite now. It only exacerbates the problem of partisanship. It highlights the divide of the country, and you are seeing it with COVID-19. 

Emily Crocetti (host)

Sad but true. The country did not come together over COVID as during past disasters. And that creates an even greater public health challenge for vaccination rollout, before variants can further proliferate and spread. 

Robert Pease (host) 

We asked Dr Guidry at what point she and her colleagues in the Media and Health Lab began to monitor the spread of misinformation around COVID vaccinations and devise strategies to work against it. 

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

The vaccine development started in January of 2020, the pure COVID vaccine development started, obviously there had been a lot of development for vaccines that now applies as well. But as soon as I heard about a new vaccine being developed, I thought, this is going to be something where misinformation is going to take place. It’s likely going to flourish for a while. And we decided to start doing some surveys and content analyses, looking at specifically how to counteract misinformation, how to answer questions when there’s not a whole lot we knew yet about the vaccines. So I would say, middle of January, end of January of 2020.

Robert Pease (host)

Historically there’s always been skepticism towards vaccines at first, even with polio, which was so widespread and so horrible, but then over time people get on board, you know, friends and neighbors get the vaccine and there’s a wave of acceptance. Have we seen that to the same degree with COVID, or is too early to assess that? 

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

A little bit of both. If it’s too early to assess, it’s because we’re still in the midst of COVID, we’re still in the midst of vaccine development. We’re still gonna deal with boosters. One of the problems with a lot of infectious diseases is that we don’t see them anymore, or we don’t see how horrible polio was. We hear about it. And then we’re asking people to do something that has been developed really quickly. And so I think what you saw is there was a lot of vaccine hesitancy last spring, going into last summer as the vaccine became available in November, December last year. A lot of words about how actually there was 70-90-95% efficacy for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which is an incredible result. We have seen the vaccine hesitancy go down. And that makes sense, because as people get the vaccine and as people see their family, friends, their colleagues, anyone they know get the vaccine and they’re okay, the vaccine becomes more acceptable and people become a little bit less concerned about it. I think wherever it was, now we’re going to see who truly is vaccine hesitant about this vaccine. Right now, the best that we know is that there’s still 20-25% of the U.S. population that is not willing to get the vaccine in certain groups. That percentage is a lot higher. Then we have nations around the world that have had no vaccine yet at all. Now we have all kinds of travel restrictions. And the problem with those is we can’t keep those in place. We live in a global village, so we are not truly protected against COVID until everyone is protected. And that I think is where our biggest challenge is going to be in the coming three months, year, two, three years.

Emily Crocetti (host)

And when it comes to COVID vaccine skepticism have you seen more of a holistic health kind of population of moms, or just people in general, that seemed to be more left-leaning politically, connect with people who are more like libertarian, the don’t tell me like what to do with my body, group of people? Have you seen that kind of unlikely grouping happen?

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

We’ve seen that with vaccines for years. I think that’s one of the interesting things, that anti-vaccine hesitancy comes from different perspectives. And it’s because people have different concerns. Some people are concerned about civil liberties, about rights. Some people are concerned about health and safety. Some people are somewhere in the middle. And I think that’s what makes this interesting for our perspective, because it means communicating about all of this can get a little bit more complex. Are they concerned it was developed too quickly? Are they concerned that there is a microchip in it, that the government’s going to get into you via vaccine? Are they concerned that it may cause infertility? It doesn’t, but is that something they’re concerned about? There’s all these different things. And I think one of the most important things is finding out what are someone’s concerns and addressing those and not trying to address every concern with every person without having any idea what may be their greatest fear about this vaccine.

Emily Crocetti (host) 

Fear is a big part of this problem. And we learned something about that from the author of The Fear Factor, the Georgetown neuropsychology Professor Dr. Abigail Marsh in our “Heard from the Herd” episode.

Abigail Marsh 

When communities believe they’re being threatened by others who they perceive as a threat to their values, or to their livelihood, or to their welfare, you tend to get more black and white sort of thinking, which is another strong promoter of ideology. A lack of trust – a tendency to be mistrustful – and hostile and prone to conspiratorial thinking which are all sort of bound up together.

Robert Pease (host) 

And, unfortunately, fear spreads online a whole lot faster than fact checking. It makes connections, groups, communities, and before you know it, walls of resistance against all kinds of things.

[Archival audio collage, vaccine misinformation]

Emily Crocetti (host) 

We’re having this discussion in the spring of 2021, and as Dr. Guidry implies, there’s a lot more to come both with current vaccination efforts then a booster for variants possibly a few months from now. 

Robert Pease (host) 

I can just hear the push back on the booster shots already. “Wait, I thought you told me that the vaccine was effective.” 

Emily Crocetti (host) 

Oh, if only we had just a slightly higher level of commitment towards scientific literacy in this country. 

Robert Pease (host) 

Several of our guests have spoken to this problem, but maybe none as effectively as one of our non-scientist guests, or at least non-lab coat science. The stand-up comedian but committed science podcaster, Shane Mauss. He talked about conspiracy theories amongst his fellow comedians.

Shane Mauss 

But there’s a lot of people that are very, very funny that are into conspiracies. I mean, comedians by and large have these personality traits of… usually they’re pretty intelligent. Usually, they don’t have a classical education. And so they haven’t been taught, say, like I mentioned, correlation versus causation. And so just simple things like that, that a 101 science class could’ve easily saved you some real embarrassing ideas. And, you know, comedians also have a fondness for really novel ideas. And it’s fun to think that you’re the only one that’s figured this thing out about shape-shifting lizard people or whatever. And so you have the wrong mix of those otherwise really admirable, useful, great traits, and you have yourself a conspiracy theorist and it’s unfortunate.

Emily Crocetti (host)

But there isn’t time to give that all important 101 science course right now. And everyone’s sick of zooming anyway. Meanwhile the fight goes on to convince the most skeptical segments of the public that this vaccine is in everyone’s best interest. 

Robert Pease (host) 

We asked Dr. Guidry, how is that effort going?  Even with all the facts and logic on your side, how does anyone combat basic human fear reinforced by social media disinformation?  

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

Well, that’s the $364,000 question. I was trying to think of some large number right there. We don’t know yet. We’re hoping yes. Misinformation is really hard to fight and misinformation online is probably even harder to fight. Often there’s a boomerang effect. So if someone adopts a piece of a viewpoint of something about a vaccine and that information is wrong, it is really hard to convince someone otherwise. That’s just who we are as human beings. Once we make up our minds on something, it’s just really hard to correct that. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And we definitely have strategies to do that. It’s just the sooner we get to people with correct information, that’s really, really super important. 

Robert Pease (host)

So that brings to mind a couple of interviews with upcoming guests. Peter Coleman, a social psychologist at Columbia University. He’s led this effort at bridging political divides through his Difficult Conversations Lab, and also Christopher Bail of Duke University on the problems of polarization in social media. And their conclusion is that changing people’s minds is extremely difficult. So what do you find to be most effective? And obviously nothing is magical in combating vaccine skepticism.

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

Realize, first of all, you may be the trusted messenger. You may be the person that they may trust to an extent to communicate about something like the vaccine. Second, approach people with empathy and realize that we’ve all been in a really hard situation, and it may not have been the same for everyone. I heard someone say, I saw it online, “we’re all in the same storm. We’re not in the same boat, but we’ve all been in this same COVID storm.” And so expressing empathy and saying, “you know what? I understand that you’re nervous. I understand this has been a scary time. I understand that you are concerned. Let me tell you my experiences.” And I think the third thing is to talk about your own experiences. “Let me tell you why I got the vaccine. Let me tell you why I’m getting my kids vaccinated. Let me tell you the relief that I felt.” So find out what people are concerned about, approach them with empathy, try to not have the conversation on social media. If you have it there, do it via private messenger, via some sort of  a personal private communication. And then finally, I would say again, coming from the perspective of approaching someone who is in your own circle of influence: your family, friends, acquaintances, don’t ever make the vaccine misinformation stand over the relationship. Don’t break off relationships over this. In other words, because someone may have questions right now, and they may not be ready to say, I’m going to get the vaccine, but maybe in three months they will be, and they’ll come to you for information, if you haven’t shut that door. 

Robert Pease (host) 

Social media platforms, are they doing enough or are they always just doing enough to make it look like they’re doing something?

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

Oh, ouch. They’ve been doing a lot, and personally as an individual and as a public health professional, I’m grateful for that. I also know it’s a fine line. And I also know that misinformation is going to try to find a way, so whatever we do to block certain pieces of information that are absolutely not true, if people are truly passionate about this, they’re going to try to find a way to communicate it. Are they doing enough? I don’t know what more they could do. I don’t know their systems in depth. I’m grateful they’re willing to talk. I think one of the problems is that social media developed so quickly and it was a train that just went from 0-10,000 in, you know, the blink of an eye. And we all started running with this thing and talking and communicating, and now we’re running into some things and it’s really hard to change the trajectory of a train like that when it’s running this fast. 

Robert Pease (host)

So I’m curious as you look at other countries in the EU, have you seen some creative approaches that seem to be more effective than just pointing people to the CDC and to factual information?

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

I think again, the personal communication, the being able to reach out through people that they trust, I think that’s not a country specific one. I think that is something that is working across the board a bit better than some other things. Finding out again why people are concerned and getting creative messaging public health entities. Again, I adore them. I love the CDC and love the World Health Organization, but we also know that family care, family practice physicians, family physicians, primary care physicians, are among the most trusted people in medicine, but also the most trusted people in general. I also think finding other trusted messengers. So look at religious messages, clergy of any type, that may not work for everybody, but there are some people that are who they’re going to listen to. Let’s get celebrities involved. I don’t really care how people get to it. I just want them to get to getting the vaccine because I know how helpful it’s going to be. And so I think looking at it more creatively and saying, what is a better way, what may be a good way for this person? No one’s going to listen to any one source all the time. So that’s how humankind functions. We all have different people, entities, corners, that we’re more likely to listen to. And please let’s learn from this for the next one. This is not the last pandemic, this snuffed last virus, let’s try to be a little bit better. And I think a lot of it, Robert, is this idea of science, communication of science literacy, of helping people understand science better, not just about vaccines, but about climate change, about really anything that science develops. We need to get better at this. We need to train people better at this because that’s something where we’ve really seen a nosedive.

[Archival audio collage, news]

Emily Crocetti (host)

It also seems like when you try to shut down misinformation, it plays into the hands of the people who are skeptical of government control to begin with. And it kind of doubles down, like, “see, look, they’re trying to silence us.” 

Dr. Jeanine Guidry 

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the other things I hear a lot of people say is, “I can do my own research.” Well, yes and no. And I think that is something really, I can do my own research on behavioral responses to infectious diseases because that’s something I actually studied for a long time. But if you want to ask me about vaccines in general, how has it been made, how does the MRNA vaccine work versus the Johnson & Johnson vaccine? I still go to my colleagues who are virologists and immunologists and vaccine developers, because now I don’t understand that field well enough as a scientist to actually have to actually do my own research. And I think that’s a general concern. This idea that we don’t trust expertise any more, especially in the intellectual realm, we need to do better at science communication. That’s not going to be a quick fix for anything, but we really need to train people better from elementary school. And maybe earlier, even on how to understand science, we need to train teachers better, how to teach science and communication about science, because otherwise we’re going to keep coming back to this over and over again. We are now approaching 600,000 people dead in the U.S. alone from COVID-19. I have two young friends and they lost both their parents to COVID. Just yesterday was Mother’s day. I have no words for that. And we can’t prevent all those deaths. This is a pandemic and it’s a serious disease, but we need to get better at preventing the ones that we can prevent. We need to get better at helping people understand that this vaccine is as close to a public health miracle as I’ve ever seen. 

[Archival audio collage]

Robert Pease (host)

That was our featured guest today, Dr. Jeanine Guidry, Founder and Director of the Media and Health Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University. She and her colleagues monitor online medical misinformation and devise strategies to combat it.  

Emily Crocetti (host) 

Their current efforts are focused on the misinformation around the safety and benefits of the COVID vaccine. 

Robert Pease (host)

As Dr. Guidry mentions, we can all be a part of that effort in talking to friends and colleagues who might be vaccine skeptical about their concerns. But we need to do so with empathy and without judgement.

Emily Crocetti (host) 

And if possible, directing them to trusted voices on this issue. Yes, the CDC and WHO and state health agency websites. But also to physicians and physician’s assistants for a more personalized discussion. 

Robert Pease (host)

Let’s hope Dr. Guidry and her Media & Health Lab, and many other such groups, are successful in their efforts to allay vaccine anxiety both for the current COVID pandemic and, unfortunately, the next inevitable crisis. If you find yourself hesitant, or just need some solid info about the Covid-19 vaccine and how to contend with misinformation, check out the links in our Show Notes. They were hand-picked by Dr. Guidry, and we’ll be checking back with her on these efforts. 

Robert Pease (host) 

Next time, however, we’re going to learn more about the spread of conspiracy theories online, but also the formation of cults online and offline. We’ll have three special guests on this episode: Doni Whitsett, a professor at USC and Dr. Steven Hassan, author of The Cult of Trump and a former member of the Unification Church. 

Emily Crocetti (host)  

And also Rachel Bernstein, an experienced therapist for cult deprogramming and the host of the IndoctriNation Podcast

Rachel Bernstein

I think cults do still occupy a physical space and it’s just in the brain. And so there doesn’t have to be a compound and it doesn’t have to be that it’s where you live, or you live with all the other members in a tiny little apartment somewhere, and the control is constant. Many people are getting into very controlling organizations, just having never met the people in person. So I think the distance actually can create more of a bond, because you fill in the blanks with what you want to be true about the group and what you want to be true about the people you’re talking to.

Robert Pease (host) 

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone today, follow us on your favorite social media platform, and subscribe to our newsletter. Find links in our show notes. 

This has been Robert Pease and Emily Crocetti for the Purple Principle team: Alison Byrne, producer; Kevin A. Kline, senior audio engineer; Emily Holloway, digital operations and outreach; Dom Scarlett, research associate. Original music composed by Ryan Adair Rooney. The Purple Principle is a Fluent Knowledge production.