Mercola Sues Google

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong.  

Brendan Pierson at Reuters:

A Florida doctor known for spreading false claims about vaccines has sued Google LLC and its parent company Alphabet Inc for removing all of his content from their YouTube video-sharing platform with no advance notice, saying the move breached its terms of service.

In the lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco, Joseph Mercola asked the court to order Google to reinstate his YouTube account and to award unspecified money damages.

YouTube to Take Down Videos Linking Vaccines to Autism

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms have helped spread this dangerous myth.

Dan Milmo at The Guardian reports that YouTube will take down videos with vaccine misinformation, including claims that they cause autism.

Matt Halprin, the global head of trust and safety at YouTube, said vaccine misinformation was a global problem and had spilled over from the spreading of falsehoods about Covid jabs.

“Vaccine misinformation appears globally, it appears in all countries and cultures,” he said.

Halprin added that falsehoods around the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which has been wrongly attributed to causing autism, were an example of the misinformation YouTube will target.

“There is still a lot of challenges around MMR and people arguing whether that causes autism. And as we know, the science is very stable that vaccines do not cause autism,” he said.

Halprin said the ban would also apply, for instance, to content that claims vaccines cause cancer, infertility or contain microchips, the latter having gained prominence as a falsehood about Covid jabs.

In 2019, a major study affirmed that there was no link between autism and MMR, in the wake of a pre-Covid upsurge in vaccine scepticism, fanned by social media and anti-government populism. A paper in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, which is published by the American College of Physicians, found “no support for the hypothesis of increased risk for autism after MMR vaccination in a nationwide unselected population of Danish children”.

...
On Wednesday, a search under the terms “MMR vaccine autism” produced a page of results containing rebuttals of any link between the vaccine and autism, including a video entitled “Vaccines and autism: how the myth started”. However, the page also includes a TV interview with the actor Robert De Niro in which he states that Vaxxed, a documentary directed by Andrew Wakefield – one of the key figures in promoting discredited links between MMR and autism – is a film that “people should see”. De Niro was being interviewed in 2016 after his Tribeca film festival pulled a screening of Vaxxed in the wake of a backlash against the film.

YouTube, Conspiracy Theory, and Vaccine Hesitancy

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong. 

At Vaccines, Will Jennings and colleagues have an article titled  "Lack of Trust, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Social Media Use Predict COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy." The abstract:

As COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the world, there are growing concerns about the roles that trust, belief in conspiracy theories, and spread of misinformation through social media play in impacting vaccine hesitancy. We use a nationally representative survey of 1476 adults in the UK between 12 and 18 December 2020, along with 5 focus groups conducted during the same period. Trust is a core predictor, with distrust in vaccines in general and mistrust in government raising vaccine hesitancy. Trust in health institutions and experts and perceived personal threat are vital, with focus groups revealing that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is driven by a misunderstanding of herd immunity as providing protection, fear of rapid vaccine development and side effects, and beliefs that the virus is man-made and used for population control. In particular, those who obtain information from relatively unregulated social media sources—such as YouTube—that have recommendations tailored by watch history, and who hold general conspiratorial beliefs, are less willing to be vaccinated. Since an increasing number of individuals use social media for gathering health information, interventions require action from governments, health officials, and social media companies. More attention needs to be devoted to helping people understand their own risks, unpacking complex concepts, and filling knowledge voids.

From the article:

Our findings linking YouTube users to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy are novel, but in line with existing research on other vaccines. A study of YouTube vaccine content found that 65.5% of videos discouraged vaccine use, focussing on autism, undisclosed risks, adverse reactions, and alleged mercury content [29]. A 2017 analysis of 560 YouTube vaccine videos in Italy found that the majority of videos were negative, linking vaccines with autism and serious side effects [30]. Those who refused vaccines in the focus groups had low levels of trust in the government, and believed that the virus was man-made or a type of population control for certain groups. Individuals who were younger and had lower levels of education were also vaccine-hesitant.

29. Basch, C.H.; Zybert, P.; Reeves, R.; Basch, C.E. What do popular YouTube videos say about vaccines? Child. Care. Health Dev. 2017, 43, 499–503. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
30. Donzelli, G.; Palomba, G.; Federigi, I.; Aquino, F.; Cioni, L.; Verani, M.; Carducci, A.; Lopalco, P. Misinformation on vaccination: A quantitative analysis of YouTube videos. Hum. Vaccin. Immunother. 2018, 14, 1654–1659. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]

The Anti-Vaxx Playbook

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing disease to spread.  Trump has helped spread misinformation.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate has a report titled "The Anti-Vaxx Playbook."  The executive summary:

1. Drawing on access to a private conference attended by the world’s leading antivaxxers, CCDH has been able to reveal their plan to use social media to spread distrust about the Covid vaccine and recruit new supporters to their cause.

2. Leading anti-vaxxers view Covid as an historic opportunity for them to reach largernumbers of the public than ever before, and to create long-lasting distrust in theeffectiveness, safety and necessity for vaccination.

3. Online anti-vaxxers continue to grow, with 147 of the leading accounts gaining 10.1 million followers since 2019, an increase of 25%. The additional growth took place primarily on Instagram and YouTube, with anti-vaxxers adding an extra 4.3 million followers on each platform.

4. Anti-vaxxers have developed a sophisticated playbook for spreading uncertainty about a Covid vaccine, converting vaccine-hesitant people into committed antivaxxers, and resisting attempts to remove their misinformation.

5. Online anti-vaxxers have organised themselves around a “master narrative” comprised of three key messages: Covid is not dangerous, the vaccine is dangerous and vaccine advocates cannot be trusted.

6. Alternative health entrepreneurs, conspiracy theorists and accounts aimed at parents or ethnic communities vastly expand the reach of this master narrative and tailor it to cause uncertainty in their audiences.

7. Anti-vaxxers have created accessible online “answering spaces” such as Facebook Groups, Instagram accounts and purpose-built websites that are designed to answer legitimate questions about a Covid vaccine with anti-vaccine misinformation.

8. The most established anti-vaccine “answering spaces” identify vaccine hesitant individuals, convert them into committed anti-vaxxers and offer training to make them more effective activists.

9. Anti-vaxxers are attempting to mitigate the removal of their misinformation by adopting a “Lifeboat Strategy” of migrating their followers to “alt-tech” platforms such as Telegram and Parler, but with little success.

10. The public are urged not to engage with anti-vaxx misinformation online, even to rebut it or criticise it, because doing so only spreads the misinformation to new audiences. The example is given of anti-vaxxer narratives “trending” on social media on the first day of the vaccine rollout, primarily due to pro-vaccine accounts amplifying them. Instead, users are urged to share pro-vaccine messages.

11. Platforms are urged to remove the accounts of anti-vaxx “superspreaders”, those accounts with the largest followings and using the most cynical tactics. The report provides evidence that some are guilty of promoting false cures for Covid and training their social media followers to spread harmful misinformation.

12. Pro-vaccine practitioners are advised to focus on inoculating the public by ignoring individual memes and focusing on the master narrative, with a series of suggestions for how “inoculation” can make individuals more resilient to anti-vaxxer messaging.

From the report:

Our research discovered one document listed as a resource for activists on the now defunct “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” Facebook Group that contained a list of talking points aimed at persuading African Americans that health authorities such as the CDC had suppressed evidence that vaccine injuries were more common amongst African Americans. Another emerging version of this narrative suggests that vaccine advocates are planning to target ethnic minorities, using “economic coercion” to encourage them to use a Covid vaccine not for the benefit of those communities, but as a large-scale experimental sample. 

An Instagram post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with 22,000 likes advertises an event linking vaccines to the Tuskegee experiment, with a caption suggesting the MMR vaccine is linked to higher rates of autism in African-American children 

 

Countering Antivaxxers

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Gallup:  If an FDA-approved vaccine to prevent coronavirus/COVID-19 was available right now at no cost, would you agree to be vaccinated? GALLUP PANEL, JULY 20-AUG. 2, 2020

.............................................Yes No
...............................................% %
All Americans ......................65 35
Men ......................................65 35
Women .................................65 35
Democrats ............................81 19
Independents ........................59 41
Republicans ..................47 53

Elizabeth Cohen and Dana Vigue at CNN:

While anti-vaxxers flood social media with lies about the upcoming coronavirus vaccine -- that it contains monkey brains, that it's a CIA plot to take over the world -- the government's multi-billion-dollar vaccine effort has yet to come up with a public education campaign to counteract that propaganda.

"We are behind here," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. "We haven't done a good job of getting [coronavirus vaccine] information out there."

The stakes are high. A CNN poll in May found one-third of Americans said they would not try to get vaccinated against coronavirus, even if the vaccine is widely available and low cost.

"Speaking for myself, I think I underestimated the level of public resistance," Collins said. "I didn't expect it to be that widespread."

A spokesman for "Operation Warp Speed," the Trump administration's effort to get a coronavirus vaccine on the market, said a public education campaign will "soon focus" on vaccine education.

"We see more vaccine hesitancy with the Covid vaccine than with other vaccines. We know that. This concerns us, of course," said Michael Caputo, an assistant secretary for the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Thomas Buckley at Bloomberg:

As the fervor grew, Todd Wolynn, a fellow doctor and a co-founder of Shots Heard Round the World, an informal group that seeks to protect vaccine advocates from online abuse, enlisted 16 volunteers to help get hateful posts removed and some of their 6,000 authors banned. Wolynn also thought a counterattack might be in order—so he called in Zubin Damania.

Damania is something of a health-care avenger. His YouTube videos, in which he raps in costume or rants about the anti-vaccine movement and wider problems with the medical system, have been viewed tens of millions of times. He’s one of a growing number of physicians turned online influencers able to communicate compellingly to viewers who might otherwise fall prey to pseudoscience. After getting the call from Wolynn, he organized a virtual rally, calling on health workers of all stripes to post videos, statements, and evidence to discredit Baldwin’s aggressors alongside the hashtag #DoctorsSpeakUp. The resulting campaign trended nationally on Twitter.

Fighting Vaccine Hesitancy

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

From the Sabin Vaccine Institute:

The end of the COVID-19 pandemic will depend on our ability to address vaccine hesitancy, one of the top 10 threats to global health, before a vaccine is put on the market. Meeting the Challenge of Vaccination Hesitancy, a report published in June 2020 by the Sabin-Aspen Vaccine Science & Policy Group, lays out actionable steps that leaders across healthcare, research, philanthropy and technology can take to build confidence in vaccines and vaccinations.

...

Three ‘Big Ideas’ proposed in the report address the primary barriers to vaccine acceptance, provide a framework for progress, and sound a call to action. They are:

• A new media collaborative to serve as an interface between the vaccination community and social media platforms
• A research agenda to create ample evidence-based knowledge about the sources of vaccine hesitancy and the best ways to counter it
• A new narrative to shift the conversation around immunization to one that focuses on achievements and promise and helps build resiliency in the vaccine enterprise

This report from the 2019 meeting of the Sabin-Aspen Vaccine Science & Policy Group highlights that although vaccination remains a well-accepted social norm worldwide, a combination of factors—including the spread of misinformation on social media; decreased trust in institutions including government, science and industry; and weaknesses within health systems—has diminished confidence among some populations.

The report includes several commissioned papers.

 From "The Complex Contagion of Doubt in the Anti-Vaccine Movement," by Damon Centola.  Anti-vaxxers use the strategy of FUD:  fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Foes of the vaccination enterprise generate fear by claiming that vaccines don’t work as well as they are portrayed, contain harmful ingredients, or trigger pathologic processes leading to long-term physical and mental health problems, such as asthma, diabetes, and autism spectrum disorders. Some even claim that vaccines have been intentionally laced with ingredients that cause cancer or infertility. Anti-vaccine communications inevitably include testimony from people whose children have diseases or conditions allegedly brought on by vaccination. Since these maladies infrequently occur during a child’s development, such assertions can trigger doubt about the safety of vaccines, leading to inaction or resistance.

Proponents of vaccination have generally been unable to resort to the same tactics when
describing the risks of vaccine-preventable illness because vaccinations’ very success has greatly diminished outbreaks of disease that would otherwise have provided fodder for powerful messages. Thus, the emotional battlefield is asymmetric—on the one hand, naive parents see serious infirmities that loud voices attribute to vaccines, while on the other, they hear gentle admonitions to continue a procedure whose benefits may be nearly invisible. Public health scientists have demonstrated little expertise in creating stories that generate emotion and engage popular attention, and vaccine foes have manipulated internet search engines to steer people toward false information—in the United States and Europe, as well as in Pakistan, the Philippines, Brazil, Egypt, India, and Nigeria (DiResta & Wardle, this volume).

From "Online Misinformation about Vaccines," by Renée DiResta and Claire Wardle

A popular platform for hosting anti-vaccine videos, YouTube offers a distribution mechanism of its own via a recommendation engine that suggests new videos to users. Many antivaccine organizers and influencers maintain their own YouTube channels. Following the release of Vaxxed, the movie’s production team traveled the country in a bus, recording “vaccine injury” anecdotes from parents. The videos, which were often live-streamed to other apps such as Periscope, were designed for maximum emotional resonance. Many include severely autistic, nonverbal children and feature a parent warning others not to make the same mistake they allegedly did.

Many other channels are conspiratorial in nature, purporting to expose the cover-up of a
link between vaccines and autism. In one 2018 study, academics analyzed 560 YouTube
videos “related to the link between vaccines and autism or other serious side effects on
children” (Donzelli et al., 2018). They found that most of the anti-vaccine videos (392 of the 560) focused on supporting this misinformation and that the number of anti-vaccine videos posted to YouTube was increasing every year

Keyes and Chlorine Dioxide

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss autism quackery.  One particularly dangerous "cure" involves bleach.

Kelly Weill at The Daily Beast:

The “Miracle Mineral Solution” (“MMS”) movement falsely claims a dangerous chlorine dioxide cocktail can cure almost any illness, from autism to infertility. A new addition to the Facebook-fueled movement is IAMtv, a conservative web-based channel fronted by Alan Keyes, former diplomat and adviser to President Ronald Reagan who appears in pro-MMS broadcasts with bottles of MMS from a dubious bleach “church” featured prominently on his desk. IAMtv figures even claim Keyes is helping the network spread its mission from Uganda to the halls of power in the U

... 

“I'm convinced that chlorine dioxide is going to be what God uses to bring down Big Pharma,”    [IAMtv host Bob] Sisson said in an October episode of Keyes’ show titled “Big Pharma: The Truth of MMS.” Sisson directed viewers to Genesis II’s website and encouraging them to buy MMS. “But I do know that that it will detox your body and then God himself will heal you. And we're finding in like in Uganda, curing malaria and poisoning and diabetes and AIDS by the way. It's amazing."

Keyes listened approvingly, then said those claims were “why I was so interested in MMS and going to Uganda so far [...] There will be no excuse for pretending that you should price it at hundreds of dollars a dose so that people can make billions off of it.”

Sitting on Keyes’ desk for the entire episode: two bottles of Genesis II bleach.

From FDA:

If you’re drinking “Miracle” or “Master” Mineral Solution or other sodium chlorite products, stop now. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has received many reports that these products, sold online as “treatments,” have made consumers sick.

The FDA first warned consumers about the products in 2010. But they are still being promoted on social media and sold online by many independent distributors. The agency strongly urges consumers not to purchase or use these products.

The products are known by various names, including Miracle or Master Mineral Solution, Miracle Mineral Supplement, MMS, Chlorine Dioxide (CD) Protocol, and Water Purification Solution (WPS). When mixed according to package directions, they become a strong chemical that is used as bleach.

Some distributors are making false—and dangerous—claims that Miracle Mineral Supplement mixed with citric acid is an antimicrobial, antiviral, and antibacterial liquid that is a remedy for autism, cancer, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, flu, and other conditions. But the FDA is not aware of any research showing that these products are safe or effective for treating any illness. Using these products may cause you to delay other treatments that have been shown to be safe and effective.

The bottom line: Sodium chlorite products are dangerous, and you and your family should not use them

In this clip, Sisson and Keyes talk about chlorine dioxide at about 11:00.


 

YouTube Bans MMS Videos

 In The Politics of Autism, I discuss autism quackery.  One particularly dangerous"cure" involves bleach.

Tom Porter at Business Insider:

YouTube has updated its policies to explicitly ban videos which endorse the substance known as Miracle Mineral Solution.

The change comes after a Business Insider investigation found hundreds of videos on the site presenting the substance as a cure for cancer, autism and malaria.

The claims are groundless, and medical authorities warn members of the public not to ingest the substance, which is actually a type of toxic bleach, chlorine dioxide.

Business Insider in an investigation in May exposed how YouTube videos promoting the substance were racking up millions of views, with many claiming the substance has curative properties.

When Business Insider flagged the videos to the site, YouTube shut down some channels mentioned in the investigation which it said breached its rules against promoting harmful substances.

Bleach Quackery Persists on Social Media

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss autism quackery.  One particularly dangerous"cure" involves bleach.

E.J. Dickson at Rolling Stone:

Although the FDA has issued numerous warnings about the effects of MMS (and although Humble himself has publicly admitted that the substance “cures nothing”), there are still numerous videos on YouTube of Humble promoting the substance as a cure for, among other things, autism, according to a Business Insider investigation; the report also found that the videos were easily accessible on the platform, coming up as a top result in searches for terms like “autism” and, in some cases, racking up millions of views.

There are also a number of private Facebook groups advocating for using MMS or other forms of sodium chlorite as a cure for autism. Such groups, which overlap a great deal with anti-vaccine content, contain shocking testimonials from mothers who administer these treatments to their autistic children, reporting horrifying adverse reactions; in one particularly appalling case, a mother of a six-year-old autistic boy was reportedly investigated by police after giving him a bleach enema, which led to him having his bowel removed and needing a colostomy bag.