Original article (in Croatian) was published on 28/10/2020
It all merged into one huge conspiracy theory.
The novel coronavirus does not exist or if it does, it is not so dangerous at all. It was created with the help of 5G technology, so that the entire global population would agree to forced vaccination. Through the vaccine, malignant microchips will be implanted into our bodies. Behind it all is Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, one of the richest men in the world and the head of a foundation that generously supports vaccination projects in underdeveloped countries. Chip implantation will be followed by population control, which includes controlled depopulation. The dark global elites will finally fully tailor the world to their own measure, and the rest of us will be reduced to living as their slaves. If we are not useful to them, they will simply eliminate us.
The described narrative is in fact completely inaccurate, but it is nonetheless attracting more and more attention among social network users.
Conspiracy theories are surging in popularity, even though they’re not even particularly original. Misinformation about Bill Gates, 5G network technology, micro chipping, and the ominous elites shaping the “new world order” have been circulating in obscure blogs, fringe media, Internet forums, and social networks even before the coronavirus pandemic, in some cases for years.
However, the global crisis caused by COVID-19 has proven to be extremely fertile ground for the spread of misinformation and conspiracies.
Virtual lies and real consequences
Each of the individual conspiracy theories had its proponents and promoters in the pre-corona world as well. But it wasn’t until a sudden public health threat brought most of the world to a stop, imprisoning at home millions of people connected to the Internet and united in the need to understand what was happening around them, that conspiracy theorists and propagandists were starting to become united by a common narrative.
Together they became louder, stronger, more massive. The reach of content distributed by misinformation providers can easily compare to that of professional news media. Infodemic has been best used by anti-vaxxers, opponents of vaccination who are using networked online activities to expand their bubble of supporters of factually unfounded claims about vaccines-harmfulness.
The first consequences are already visible around us.
Graffiti has started appearing on the streets of Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, promoting both anti-vaccination ideology and the dangerous conspiracy theory of the growing QAnon Internet community. In fear of 5G network, telecommunications equipment is being destroyed in public areas. The protests in Zagreb and Rijeka, tendentiously called the “Festival of Freedom”, gathered thousands of people who do not believe in the coronavirus, but believe in conspiracy theories that we at the Faktograf regularly debunk as unsupported and incorrect.
However, the most dangerous consequences are yet to come.
On social media, more and more people are announcing that they will not be vaccinated against COVID-19, once a vaccine is available. They will, of course, advise their family members to do the same.
In a public opinion poll published in May 2020, more than 41 percent of Croatian respondents said they would not be vaccinated against COVID-19. A June 2020 survey shows that a total of 52 percent of Croatian citizens believe in some of the widespread conspiracy theories related to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
On the other side of the debate, scientists are dedicated to researching the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and its consequent disease COVID-19. They believe that the discovery of the vaccine is the best chance to return to normal life, as well as to save the lives of people endangered by COVID-19.
How did we come to the point where a significant proportion of the population in a public debate of existential importance would rather trust online conspiracy theorists than doctors, scientists, and journalists? What can be done to solve this problem?
We will try to answer these questions in this article. In order to get the answers, it is first necessary to comprehend the anti-vaccination ideology and look back at the historical development of the movement dogmatically opposed to vaccination.
The roots of anti-vaccine ideology
In February 2020, the online magazine Coda published an in-depth story on the historical development of the anti-vaccination movement. We have also written about the history of anti-vaccination before at Faktograf.
The organized anti-vaccination movement began to develop as soon as the news was published in 1796 that the English doctor Edward Jenner had developed a vaccine against smallpox.
The term vaccination comes from the Latin word vacca, meaning cow. Dr. Jenner used cow bio-material in making the vaccine. He immunized his patients against smallpox by exposing them to “cowpox” — a similar but much less dangerous disease that occurs frequently in cows and usually causes only a mild infection.
The pursuit against vaccines, and often against Jenner himself, in those early years in Britain was mostly led by the clergy, with the explanation that vaccines were agents of Satan, contrary to the will of God in whose name they spoke. Some doctors also provided them with support and legitimacy, by stubbornly refusing to accept the usefulness of vaccination.
Resistance to technological progress and innovation is immanent to human history. Just as some today fear the 5G network, so at the eve of the 20th century society saw widespread fear of electricity and other innovations. In the so-called western world of today, only a few can imagine life without electricity. At the same time, the anti-vaccination ideology has not only survived for 200 years, but it has also been growing stronger.
It is all about the money
The first anti-vaccine organizations were founded in Britain in the mid-19th century. The anti-vaccine ideology from Britain soon spread to the United States. Unfortunately, the U.S. is also where the opponents of vaccination got the first factual basis for their fears, when the pharmaceutical company Cutter Laboratories mistakenly launched a defective polio vaccine in 1955. Due to their negligence, 40,000 people were unnecessarily infected with polio-virus.
This incident not only increased distrust in vaccines, but also pushed a number of pharmaceutical companies toward deciding to abandon vaccine development and distribution. Faced with the possibility of lawsuits that result in reputation and financial damage, pharmaceutical companies began to give up on vaccines, the production of which is more expensive and less profitable than the more trivial drugs intended for mass and frequent consumption.
The case of the most famous anti-vaxxer of today, the British fraudster Andrew Wakefield, shows that the fears of the pharmaceutical industry were justified. In 1998, Wakefield published a scientific paper in the medical journal The Lancet in which he claimed that a cocktail of MMR vaccines (against measles, mumps and rubella) causes autism in children.
It soon turned out that Wakefield was lying. He deliberately falsified the findings of the scientific paper because he was funded by lawyers who needed an argument to sue the vaccine manufacturer. Wakefield’s discredited work was supposed to convince the courts into providing them with hefty damages.
Because of his immoral behavior, Wakefield’s medical license was revoked; in Britain he was banned from practicing medicine and presenting as a doctor. So he moved to the United States and continued his career as a propagandist, author of pamphlets and “documentaries” serving to convince the public there really is a connection between vaccines and autism, even though Wakefield’s claims have been disproven by other researchers.
Wakefield’s motives were financial. Investigative journalist Brian Deer, who first exposed Wakefield’s scam, found evidence that Wakefield, based on his fake study, intended to start his own pharmaceutical company, which he expected to be a get-rich-quick scheme. In his business plan, he stated that he expected tens of millions of pounds of revenue in the first three years of operation.
When his original plan failed, Wakefield adapted to the new circumstances. He began to promote anti-vaccine ideology around the world; raving about the harmfulness of vaccines and presenting himself as a victim of the medical establishment. He has made a fairly successful career: he has found rich sponsors in the US, left his wife for Australian model Elle Macpherson, and is supported by the US President Donald Trump, one of the world’s most influential disinformation peddlers.
A market of 58 million people
A global anti-vaccination network has been created around Wakefield, whose branch also operates in Croatia. In 2019, local anti-vaccination activists organized Wakefield’s visit to Split, Croatia’s coastline capital and second largest city.
Networking of anti-vaxxers in Europe and the US has been facilitated by social networks. According to a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the anti-vaccination movement has 58 million followers and supporters around the world. It is estimated that big tech companies earn around a billion dollars a year from the anti-vaccine industry. A study by The Guardian back in February 2019 showed that big tech platforms greatly contribute to the spread of anti-vaccine propaganda.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, digital platforms have become aware of the danger posed by the denial of medical knowledge. In October 2020, Facebook decided not to accept anti-vaccine ads anymore, and YouTube announced that it would remove video content containing misinformation about vaccines.
In addition to monetizing viral digital content, the anti-vaccine industry also makes money by selling dietary supplements that they like to present as miracle cures, more natural and superior to the achievements of conventional, science-based medicine.
Such “snake oil salesmen” also operate in Croatia; Faktograf recently reported on the case of the anti-vaxx fraudster Jadranka Vrhovec, who built a very successful business on the sale of supplements. Her main channel of communication with customers is Facebook, through which she promotes her products as a cure for all conceivable diseases — from autism to Ebola.
That’s how anti-vaxxers work
The main tools of the anti-vaccine industry are propaganda and hatred. They use propaganda to promote their ideology on social networks. Since there are no scientific facts that would support their beliefs, anti-vaxxers flood the public space with misinformation and manipulation.
It has long been known that misinformation is most successful if it appeals not to reason but to emotion. Anti-vaxxers have learned this lesson well. Their messages have a wide echo because they appeal to the love that parents feel for their children, i.e. to the parents’ fear of putting their child’s health at risk.
The narrative of the anti-vaccination movement is a standard populist story about the conflict between the people and the elite. They present themselves as victims of the pharmaceutical industry and corrupt elites, as “common people” who only fight for the health of their own and other people’s children. It’s a story of David v. Goliath.
People who oppose them by pointing out scientific facts and societal damage caused by the spread of false information about vaccines are labelled as traitors and hacks. Anti-vaxxers rally against such people on social networks, encouraging their followers to harass and threaten them.
Since Faktograf consistently debunks anti-vaccine propaganda, we have also experienced this online bullying. Because of their work, Faktograf journalists receive daily insults and regular threats of death and physical violence. Back in 2017, the then president of the Croatian parliamentary Health Committee, Ines Strenja Linić, also spoke publicly about the pressures and threats of the anti-vaccination movement. The same pattern of behavior has been observed in other countries as well (NBC, The Guardian, Stat, NPR).
Shaken trust
The organized activities of the anti-vaccination movement in Croatia intensified after the last pandemic, i.e. after the spread of swine flu in 2009.
The spread of this disease in the media was very closely monitored, often along with predicting catastrophic outcomes. The interest of the media and the public was attracted by the fact that it was a pandemic of the H1N1 strain of flu. The same strain of flu had already ravaged the world a hundred years earlier, killing tens of millions of people. At the time, the disease was colloquially called the “Spanish flu”, although it is not known exactly where it originated from.
However, the 2009 swine flu did not prove to be significantly more dangerous than the common seasonal flu in terms of contagion and number of victims. It is estimated to have infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people worldwide and killed between 150 and 575 thousand people.
The swine flu pandemic, however, has very successfully undermined public confidence in the media (due to intensive reporting on the disease that has proven to be relatively mild), but also in healthcare institutions. A British investigation has exposed a corruption scandal at the World Health Organization, showing that scientists who advocated the supply of the H1N1 flu vaccine were also on the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies that produced the vaccines in question. The vaccine they promoted proved ineffective and harmful.
At the same time, the Croatian public first met Srećko Sladoljev, today the most prominent figure of the national anti-vaccination movement. Sladoljev publicly spoke out as a whistle-blower, then employee of the Immunology Institute, against the non-transparent procedure of procuring vaccines. Ten years ago, Sladoljev was recognized for his civic courage and activism in an award handed out by the democracy watchdog NGO Gong, also the publisher of Faktograf.hr.
Driven by alarm around the swine flu pandemic, vaccination opponents began to network. First, they tried to take over the Croatian Association for the Promotion of Patients’ Rights (HUZPPP), as part of which in 2013 they launched the initiative “Vaccination — the right to choose”. The hostile takeover attempt was unsuccessful; in 2017, they were expelled from the HUZPPP, which also publicly condemned the spread of vaccine misinformation.
Croatian anti-vaxxers then founded their own association, the Croatian Association of Activist Parents (HURA).
Anti-vaccine propaganda
The majority of HURA’s activities are propaganda. Members of this association spread disinformation through Facebook pages such as “Vaccination — the right to choose” and “Parent decides” and the unreliable fringe media website Dokumentarac.com, founded shortly after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
They also co-opt various civic initiatives for their own purposes, such as the “Parents’ Initiative 0–24”, designed to allow parents of children hospitalized during the pandemic to spend time in the hospital with them.
They are also active in the political arena, primarily through the former anti-establishment parliamentary party Živi zid and its seceded factions, the parties Slobodna Hrvatska and the Party of Ivan Pernar. Alma Demirović, President of HURA, unsuccessfully ran in the 2020 parliamentary elections on the independent list of former Member of Parliament Marin Škibola (who also entered Parliament in the 2016 elections with Živi zid).
They also organized protests against epidemiological measures to combat COVID-19, called the “Freedom Festival”. Thousands gathered at the protest in Zagreb and hundreds in Rijeka. These protests became a breeding ground for disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccination and the pandemic.
The politicization of the anti-vaccine narrative
Anti-vaccine ideology in Croatia in its beginnings was not explicitly tied to any political option, which made it easier for it to break into the mainstream. Back in 2012, the public television service HRT broadcast the documentary series “Encounters with Autism: The Real Truth”, which is full of factual inaccuracies about vaccines and opens public space to more prominent opponents of vaccination, such as Dr. Lidija Gajski.
The coronavirus pandemic, however, politicized the anti-vaccine narrative.
Dr. Gajski recently appeared in public in the company of MP Karolina Vidović Krišto, who propagates extreme right-wing nationalist views. In that public speech (called a press conference, although the participants refused to answer journalists’ questions), Dr. Gajski made a kind of proclamation, formulated through ten questions for the public, in which she made a number of manipulative and misinforming statements.
The purpose of this speech was to announce the then upcoming Zagreb “Freedom Festival” and call on citizens to come out for the protest.
Consideration of their understanding of the concept of “freedom” opens important insights into the worldviews of the members of the anti-vaccine movement who organized and spoke at the “Festival”.
At the “Festival of Freedom”, speakers promoted the freedom of an individual to behave as he or she wishes, even if their behavior imperils the health of others. An individual is free, the “Festival” organizers claimed, only if they’re free to decide whether or not to accept the factual reality and scientific consensus.
The idea that it is not only permissible but also desirable to ignore facts for the purpose of achieving political goals is historically consistently totalitarian: both Italian fascism/German Nazism and Russian Stalinism were equally based on such thinking.
It is therefore indicative that the “Freedom Festival” was supported by some (but still only a few) Croatian MPs who speak from the position of the far right. Along with Karolina Vidović Krišto, the “Festival” was visited by her colleagues from the Homeland Movement Parliamentary Club Zlatko Hasanbegović and Stipo Mlinarić, as well as Most’s MP Marin Miletić.
Far right, Russian propagandists and religious fundamentalists
The anti-vaxxers narrative fits naturally into the broader political narrative of the far right.
This phenomenon is not only noticeable in Croatia. Opponents of vaccination also find their political champions globally among members of the extreme populist right, accustomed to exploiting disinformation for political purposes (Politico, Mother Jones).
At the same time, the spread of misinformation about vaccines is supported by foreign propaganda offices whose goal is to provoke polarization in democratic societies.
Russian Internet propagandists in the English-speaking area have been doing this for years, and the same trend has now reached Croatia. The website Logicno.com, which primarily publishes Russian propaganda, became the leading bulletin of the anti-vaccination movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their collaborator Velimir Ponoš was among the organizers and speakers at the Zagreb “Freedom Festival”.
As in the beginning of the anti-vaccination movement two centuries ago, opponents of vaccination are still supported by religious fundamentalists. An American preacher thus declared Bill Gates the biblical Antichrist, in a video seen by about two million people. Leading Croatian anti-vaxxer Srećko Sladoljev shared with his followers on Facebook the exact same opinion about Gates. Research website Bellingcat recently published an analysis of misinformation about vaccines being spread within religious communities.
All of the above was more than enough for a research organization working with the American FBI to warn, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, that the anti-vaccine movement posed a serious threat to national security. European leaders have publicly expressed concern that the anti-vaccine movement could sabotage the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the long run.
Craig Silverman, an American BuzzFeed journalist who is reputed to be one of the world’s leading authorities on online disinformation, published a story under an alarming headline in May 2020: “The information apocalypse is already here, and reality is on the losing side.” Silverman concludes that the discovery of the vaccine against COVID-19 “will very likely open a new front in the information wars — one for which health authorities, social media platforms, and the public are not ready.”
And now, what?
The problem we face is dangerous and massive, but not unsolvable. Resolving it, however, will require an exceptional involvement of public institutions, primarily health and education. If we want reality not to come out of the information wars defeated, the education system will have to start taking media literacy more seriously. In a world where almost everyone has constant access to the Internet, it is necessary to teach citizens how to distinguish quality from malicious sources of information. Media literacy could, for example, be included in the school curriculum or promoted through educational content on public television and interactive websites.
The health system must also work intensively on educating the public about vaccines and their side effects. The website of the Croatian Institute of Public Health contains a large amount of useful information (such as regular reports on the side effects of vaccines), but for an average Internet user it is difficult to find this information.
An analysis of the website Netokracija from October 2019 showed that the HZJZ (Croatian National Health Service) actually makes things easier for anti-vaxxers by not optimizing its content to be recognized by online search engines. Vaccine information available from relevant sources is, as the Netokracija analysis concluded, “difficult to access, difficult to understand, and scattered.”
The same problem is present in other countries as well. The journal Science therefore recommends that healthcare institutions change the way they communicate about vaccines, i.e. try to inform citizens in simple language, using tried and tested storytelling techniques (e.g. through viral videos or memes on social networks). But more important than digital communication, according to the Science piece, is direct contact with people.
The importance of building trust in direct contact with people is also emphasized by Dr Heidi Larson, a British anthropologist who works as part of a UN working group to combat misinformation about vaccines. Dr. Larson has spent the last 20 years researching the circumstances in which people develop skepticism about vaccines, about which she also wrote a book.
She came to the conclusion that most people who show hesitation to vaccines are not fanatical opponents of science and medicine, but are pushed into opposition by the fact that they find it difficult to find answers to important questions bothering them.
In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Larson therefore advises to, among other things, avoid uncritical use of the term anti-vaxxer. It is advisable to use this label in the way we have tried to use it in this article — so that it denotes malicious individuals who spread anti-vaccine propaganda with reason and premeditation, counting on it to secure material gain.
Most people who express skepticism about vaccines are not anti-vaxxers — they are just misinformed, i.e. deceived by the propaganda of loud, aggressive and well-organized and internationally networked anti-vaxxer groups. People deceived by propaganda need to be equally involved in the public debate and provided with fact-based and clear answers to their questions.
This is a problem for which there are no quick and easy solutions. Education through open, direct and clear communication with people is still the best way to counter toxic propaganda.