Dr Rachel Heap and her wife Penny Wheeler have one mission: encouraging people to get vaccinated and to vaccinate their children.
The pair live in Mullumbimby, a small town in northern NSW where only 50 per cent for five year olds are vaccinated.
“I started hearing the fact that some people refuse vaccines and I had no idea that anything like that would exist. Why would people refuse mainstream medicine?” Dr Heap told Dateline.
Together with her wife and a group of other locals, Dr Heap started the Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters - a group advocating for vaccinations and providing verified information about the safety of vaccines.
The information provided on their website is approved by the World Health Organisation. But Dr Heap says it’s difficult countering the anti-vax narrative because misinformation, particularly on the internet, is pervasive.
“One of the things that has backfired on the internet is that it has helped people think that their opinions are as valid as expert fact and science,” Dr Heap said.
“I think that the internet can be an amazing source of information, but you have to look for that information with critical thinking and being aware of your own inbuilt biases.”
Searching for information to confirm your own beliefs is a common human behaviour known as confirmation bias. According to philosophy Professor Mark Alfano from the Australian Catholic University, it’s rife in the anti-vaxxer networks on the internet.
Dr Rachel Heap and Penny Wheeler work together to combat vaccine fear. Source: Dateline
Prof. Alfano has recently published a study of 888 people in heated discussions on Twitter; about half pro-vaccine and the other half opposed.
He said he was disappointed with his findings.
The results showed that the anti-vax and pro-vax camps exist in echo chambers.
“The pro-vaccine people are usually those with medical training, doctors and nurses. On the other side it seems to be ordinary people with no expertise in medicine,” said lead researcher Professor Mark Alfano.
He found that the anti-vaxxers had a stronger online presence fueled by an outright “obsession with the issue.”
“Many of the anti-vaxxers are mothers of children who think they are in danger or think they believe their children are sick from vaccines.
“There is an even smaller group within that community who are using it as an opportunity to sell certain products to parents who believe their children are in danger from vaccines.”
The World Health Organisation declared vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 threats to global health and in the first three months of this year there were nearly three times as many cases of measles reported globally - compared to the same period in 2018.
The UK, Greece, the Czech Republic and Albania have all been stripped of ‘measles-free’ status, due to dwindling rates of immunisation. And just this week, the US declared the end of the worst measles outbreak in three decades, while New Zealand’s Auckland has nearly 1,000 confirmed cases of the disease.
Professor Alfano and other researchers intend to craft vaccination safety messages and inject them at strategic points in the anti-vax online network.
“It’s clear from the medical research that vaccines are safe and effective, so it’s a case of finding people who are sufficiently open-minded and have a large influential following so that the message can get funneled through,” he said.
The next step would be to create an automated algorithm that can calculate the most efficient points of intervention on social media platforms.
Professor Alfano said medical professionals need to improve how they engage with parents who are sceptical of vaccinations.
“The medical community needs to do a better job at ensuring that they are trusted by mothers,” he said.
“That means they have to prove that they are trustworthy.”
For nurse Penny Wheeler, and other pro-vaccination campaigners in Mullumbimby, changing people’s minds on the Internet is an almost impossible task. Instead, she opens a dialogue with her patients and parents in Mullumbimby.
“You have to really listen. We call it the ‘thousand cups of tea approach’ because you’re not going to change deeply-held beliefs in one conversation,” she said.
