UW researcher: Misinformation on COVID vaccine is not a new narrative

The fear of the COVID vaccine seems to be real among many people. Is it based on any evidense and what are the prevailing critiques of the vaccine? Kolina Koltai is a researcher at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, and joined Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross to discuss what they are and where they’re coming from.

“All these sort of anti-vax narratives that we’re seeing today related to the COVID vaccine are actually sort of the same narratives we’ve seen over the past few decades. So, for example, questions about the safety of the vaccine, the efficacy of the vaccine, the necessity of the vaccine, things about how it was developed or how it’s distributed, or even things that are very conspiratorial,” she said.

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“For example, the link with Bill Gates is not something that’s gotten a lot of popularity over the past year. But that’s something that’s been talked about in anti-vax communities on Facebook for years.”

That said, she differentiates between the above and those may just be hesitant about taking this particular vaccine.

“Just to be clear that if someone is experiencing some sort of vaccine hesitancy or some sort of uneasiness or uncertainty about the vaccine, that’s not someone who I would call anti-vaccine or refusing all vaccines. We’ve only been living a pandemic for like almost a year now,” she said.

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“What I always try to tell people is that having those hesitations is very natural. There is always going to be misinformation about vaccines, but I always encourage people to look at, ‘Hey, there’s actually all this debunked information, like you see this anti-vax narrative,’ so someone actually has a counter-narrative of that and kind of look at that information to help guide them on their decision making.”

Dave asked the pertinent question: “Why does Bill Gates keep turning up in these conspiracies? I don’t see how he has the time to do all this stuff.”

“Well, he has the money to do this stuff, right?” Koltai joked. “I think when we look at conspiracies either vaccine related or non-vaccine, the conspiracy is usually centered around the idea that there is a sort of shadowy elite of people in power, and that there is some sort of power differential between these elite and us as like the normal people.”

“So when we talk about vaccines and conspiratorial thinking, it’s more about the idea of people in power or people who have influence — like potentially Bill Gates and government institutions like the CDC or even big pharmaceutical companies — are all working in concert because they all have power. They all have money to kind of keep the general public under control and through some means, so you see multiple conspiracies kind of having those flavors,” she said.

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