THE ANTI VACCINATION MOVEMENT AND FAKE NEWS

Discussing during our workshop, we discovered that Italy and Spain both have some kind of problem about the anti vaccination movement, connected to the phenomenon of fake news.

The anti vaccination movement started when a British scientist, Andrew Wakefield, published in 1998 an essay in which he maintained a connection between vaccines and autism. His work caused a drastic drop of the vaccinations in the United Kingdom, and caused an enormous debate into the scientific community, as no other scientist could find the same results as Wakefield. Only the British reporter Brian Deer, writing for Sunday Times, could discover in 2004 a conflict of interests that Wakefield had not declared. Thanks to Deer, Wakefield’s study was discovered as fake, and the British researcher was banished from the scientific community.

But as scepticism about vaccines seemed to be over, in the last years it came back, connected to fake news and political propaganda. Now we are going to examine in particular the cases of Italy and Spain.

In 2017, because of a drastic growth of scepticism in the public opinion about the security of vaccinations, caused by a big wave of fake news which reminded similar cases about vaccines and autism as Wakefield had described, the Italian government of Gentiloni was forced to make ten different vaccinations compulsory, instead of four. In fact, in Italy there had been a huge number of cases of children died by measles, meaning that fake news reached even the power of control on life and death.

This measure causes a political debate in Italy, between those who supported government decision, those who were simply against the compulsoriness of vaccines, called Free Vax, and those who think vaccines are actually dangerous, the No Vax. Many politicians of the political party Movimento 5 Stelle, gave their support to the last two categories, as a way of propaganda, although by the time of 2018 political elections they got a more moderate position. Roberto Burioni, an italian doctor, with the support of the Democratic Party, started a campaign of awareness about the importance of vaccines and faith in the scientific method.

Although Spain does not have the same problems as Italy or France, in 2015 started a big debate on the compulsoriness of vaccines, after a case of a six years old kid who died by diphtheria, an illness which hadn’t had any cases in over 28 years. In fact, Spain has no compulsory vaccine, except the one for rabies, but it concern the dogs. The family of the kid declared to be victim of disinformation by the anti vaccination movement, causing a feeling of indignation and blame by the scientific community all around the world. In Spain started a spread of opinions about making more vaccines compulsory.