Heard Immunity

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 20: Anti-vaccine protesters demonstrate outside 2019 Comic-Con International on July 20, 2019 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Daniel Knighton/Getty Images)

My mom finally dumped the tax preparer she employed for the past five years, thank god.

I’d pleaded with her since she moved to South Carolina to give the accountant, an old family friend, the ax after Mom said she was still paying taxes in Georgia “because Robin said that’s where my pension was based.”

But I finally won my case this year, when Mom passed along that Robin — and her mother — said they weren’t going to get a COVID vaccine “because it alters your DNA.”

“They should be so lucky,” I scoffed. I then argued why that opinion mattered. “How would you feel if you knew your pilot felt the same way?” I asked. “Do you really want someone in charge of your fate, financial or physical, if they don’t believe in science?”

Then I stumbled upon a jarring two-month study that confirmed my mother’s accountant was hardly unique. Last week, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) released a detailed report on anti-vaxxer disinformation on social media. The report found that up to 65 percent of “anti-vaccine content” on Facebook and Twitter originated from twelve influencers within the anti-vaxxer movement. 

Entitled The Disinformation Dozen, the CCDH tracked 425 social media accounts supporting anti-vaxxer theories on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The accounts racked up 59.2 million followers in December — an increase of 877,000 more than they had in June.

Moreover, the analysis of 689,000 “anti-vaccine comment” posts found that about 73 percent of the content came from the Disinformation Dozen.

Regardless of your take on vaccines, I recommend reading the report, because its got some damning information, including a detailed indictment of the 12.

Atop the list is Joseph Mercola, “a successful anti-vaccine entrepreneur, peddling dietary supplements and false cures as alternatives to vaccines.” Mercola, whose accounts remains active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, has around 3.6 million followers. Among is cure-alls is a “Hydrogen Peroxide Nebulization” therapy to fight coronavirus.

Joseph Mercola

Second on the list is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD), one of five organizations CCDH identifies as an anti-vaxxer group. Emblazoned atop CHD website is a garish promotion of its latest feature, Medical Racism: The New Apartheid.

From CHD website

Given the difficulty of getting communities of color to trust the medical community — particularly vaccinations — is it any wonder why we are still losing 1,000 people daily to the pandemic? The list includes authors, website founders and an alternative medicines physician. It’s a rogue’s gallery of swindlers, charlatans and the factually-challenged.

What’s impressive about the report is that it offers, like the vaccination, a path forward. Namely, de-platforming, which has become an invaluable tool in modulating — and moderating — the national blood pressure. That’s bad news for panic porn outlets like CNN, which has seen a 45% drop in viewership since Trump was knocked off his soapbox. But when’s the last time your stomach churned from the latest lie posted by Agent Orange?

Its recommendations:

  • Establish a clear threshold for enforcement action (such as a “two-strikes” rule on accuracy).
  • Display corrective posts to users exposed to disinformation.
  • Add warning screens when users click links to misinformation sites.
  • Institute an Accountability Application Programming Interface (API) to make the AI of social media platforms more effective.
  • Ban private and secret anti-vaccine Facebook groups.

Then of course, there’s the hard way forward: through. When COVID was hurtling past a quarter-million Americans dead on its way beyond a half-million, the right brayed about the need for herd immunity. Some folks, they bloviated, may have to risk death and go back to school or work for the greater good. That was before we had vaccination options.

Now that they’re here, perhaps what we need is heard immunity. A salvo in the “Well, that’s what I hear” defense against the progress of science and emperical evidence. It helped inoculate many of us against the Big Lie, though not entirely. Dominion’s billion-dollar lawsuits against the most egregious misinformers will cull some of that herd.

Which brings us back to Mom’s H&R Blockhead accountant. According to the CCHD study, about 1 in 6 Americans prefer ignorance over information, feelings over fact. That’s means about 17% of this country doesn’t believe in advancement.

That sounds about right.