Public health officials try to tackle pandemic of disinformation

Ohio continues to have good news in its fight against the coronavirus. On Saturday, the infection rate fell to less than 50 cases per 100,000 Ohioans.

This is the rate initially set by Gov. Mike DeWine to remove covid-related health orders, though he pulled out as federal authorities relaxed masking guidelines. The rate is a far cry from the 900 cases per 100,000 that Ohio had recorded in mid-December, Ohio Department of Health chief medical officer Bruce Vanderhoff said Monday.

But Vanderhoff and his colleagues have warned that widespread misinformation about vaccines threatens progress against the disease – especially in some pockets of Buckeye State.

“Unfortunately, the internet is rife with misinformation and, as this false information spreads, many people may be unduly concerned about receiving COVID-19 vaccines,” he told a press conference.

Distrust of vaccines is nothing new. In the early 1900s, Americans formed anti-vaccination leagues in the face of clumsy government efforts to force people to take a smallpox vaccine that had been produced with little quality control.

While this movement could have had some justification, the more modern movement has much less.

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published an article in the prestigious journal The Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The article was withdrawn and Wakefield was barred from practicing medicine after other researchers were unable to replicate its claimed results – and after investigators learned that some of the research was funded by lawyers suing vaccine makers.

But the myth of the harmful MMR vaccine persists. When a covid vaccine was developed in record time last year, perhaps it was inevitable that it would also be used by the BS machine of social media.

Extensive clinical trials and now hundreds of millions real-world vaccinations have shown vaccines approved by the United States to be safe. Yet the Kaiser Family Foundation vaccine opinion tracker shows that 15% of whites, 27% of Republicans and 24% of rural people say they will “definitely not” be vaccinated against covid.

This raises concerns that some parts of Ohio are close to collective immunity, others are not.

“In the public health community, there are concerns that if there are low vaccination rates in a particular geographic area, we may see localized pockets of covid-19 cases occurring,” Vanderhoff said, adding that this could cause an increase that would threaten children who cannot yet be vaccinated as well as the thousands of Ohioans for whom the vaccine seems ineffective.

On Monday, Vanderhoff and his colleagues tried to dispel a particularly virulent wave of disinformation: that vaccines cause infertility.

“I don’t think it’s any clearer that it can’t affect your pregnancy,” said Lisa Egbert, obstetrician / gynecologist and president of the Ohio State Medical Association.

Neel Parekh, a male infertility urologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said research continues, but so far there is no evidence that vaccines affect male sperm production or motility.

Vanderhoff also tried to dispel some of the more exotic fantasies about vaccines.

“There is currently a wacky notion on the internet that vaccines contain microchips or other harmful ingredients that can be used to control you,” he said, adding that they do not alter the DNA of somebody.

Vanderhoff also tried to dispel one of the most common claims about vaccines: that they are experimental.

He said more than 70,000 people have participated in the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials. Also the United States Food and Drug Administration The emergency use authorization may sound worrisome, but it was invoked to distribute vaccines more quickly, Vanderhoff said.

“There is nothing experimental about the vaccines we have,” he said.