Why it’s urgent that journalists understand the science behind vaccines, disinformation

By Matt DeRienzo

Vaccines have been recognized as one of the greatest scientific and public health achievements in history. They’ve saved an estimated 154 million lives globally in the last 50 years, according to a World Health Organization study. Before their introduction, nearly 1 in 5 children in the U.S. died before their fifth birthday. Their introduction eradicated smallpox globally; eliminated polio as a health threat in the U.S.; and eliminated measles as an endemic disease in the U.S., which prior to 1963 was causing 48,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths in the U.S. each year.

Yet here we are in 2025. Decades of rigorous scientific research proving the effectiveness and safety of vaccines is being cast aside, disinformation is coming from the highest levels of the federal government, scientists who defend critical public health policies on vaccines are being fired and sidelined, and further research into fighting disease is losing federal funding.

CDC statistics demonstrate dramatic declines in vaccine-preventable diseases when compared with the pre-vaccine era (CDC data via immunize.org). Click for full chart.

Few issues pose as imminent a life-and-death consequence, and journalists, particularly those covering local news, will have a huge impact, for good or bad, on how it plays out in the coming months and years.

That’s why SciLine, a nonprofit that provides free resources and tools to help journalists access, understand and incorporate more scientific evidence and expertise in their work, has published a new reporting toolkit to help journalists navigate their vaccine coverage. The toolkit includes research-backed guides designed for reporters on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines, the roots of vaccine hesitancy, the motives and methods behind the spread of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about them, and how even subtle errors in how journalists cover the issue can perpetuate false narratives.

It’s part of a larger effort by SciLine this year that includes on-deadline connection to expert sources on vaccines for local reporters; engagement with  journalists facing local vaccine policy debates and measles and other infectious disease outbreaks; media briefings with scientists about what is happening at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies; and free training programs helping journalists understand and write about the science behind vaccines and scientists effectively communicate with the media about it.

What’s at stake

Public health experts were alarmed earlier this year when measles, a disease that was eliminated decades ago in the U.S. through adoption of vaccines, re-emerged in West Texas, infecting at least 762 people and leading to two deaths.

Measles outbreaks can happen when the vaccination rate in a community falls below 95%, which is in part why most students are required to have certain vaccines to be enrolled in public schools. It’s also why public health experts emphasize that someone’s personal choice about whether to be vaccinated affects everyone else.

The increased vaccine hesitancy that led to the Texas measles outbreak happened during a time when the federal government and most state and local governments were expressing full-throated support for vaccines, as they had for decades, and were funding programs encouraging and helping people get vaccinated.

There could be cataclysmic downstream consequences from a federal government that is now actively working to discourage people from taking vaccines, spreading disinformation about them, and making official recommendations about them that go against scientific consensus and will have major consequences for access, insurance coverage and state and local policies.

In fact, a major shoe dropped recently when Florida announced plans to end vaccine mandates for public school students. While other states are working individually and in collaboration to build an infrastructure to replace what is being abandoned by the federal government and to ensure access to residents, infectious diseases don’t respect state borders, and and vulnerable populations like infants too young to be vaccinated could be at high risk if measles, whooping cough and other diseases continue to re-emerge.

Local journalists have a high-stakes role in giving the public the information and context they need to make important decisions about the health and well-being of themselves and their families.

There are also potential longer-term, more dire consequences at play. Because of the turmoil happening over federal policy, the issue of vaccines the issue of vaccines will play out prominently on the national stage, in the news media, and on the ground in schools, pharmacies, and communities, before millions of Americans who haven’t previously thought much about the issue. Minds will be made up about whether they’re effective and safe and what role government and public school districts should have in mandating them. What happens in the next few months could affect public policy and personal hesitancy about vaccines for decades to come. And it may not stop at vaccines. This opens the door to disinformation and policy changes that undermine the public’s faith in other well-established and research-backed medical and public health treatments and measures.

Journalism’s vital role

Journalists face at least three big challenges in meeting this moment:

• Audience trust. The issue of vaccines has been increasingly politicized over the past decade, and a significant portion of the public is predisposed to trust the Trump administration and other Republican leaders—or even post on social media—when they cast doubt on established science.
• Scientific expertise. Most reporters don’t have a background or training in science, but research shows that members of the public who understand how scientific research works, including its uncertainty and evolution over time, are far less likely to fall for misinformation and pseudoscience. To help the public grasp this, journalists must first be grounded in it.
• Time and resources. Legacy newsrooms are depleted, local news startups across the country typically have smaller staffs, and the 2025 news cycle is intense and chaotic. It’s one reason SciLine offers a free Expert Matching service, to help reporters with little time be able to find scientific expertise and connect with them on tight deadlines.

Media coverage can contribute to misunderstanding about vaccines in a number of ways.

For example, about 23% of Americans have identified as “vaccine-hesitant,” but many are still vaccinating their children, based on overall vaccine adoption rates. An additional 7% are completely “anti-vaccine.” (For context, surveys have shown that 10% of Americans believe the earth is flat.)

News coverage of the arguments made by a tiny percentage of the population that is anti-vaccine, much of it misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theory-based, gets enormously outsized attention in press coverage, which in turn can fuel more vaccine hesitancy in others.

For another example, think back to that time in the spring of 2020 when people were washing their mail and groceries to protect against the spread of COVID-19, before research showed that it was primarily spread through the air. Many news reports depicted the first approach as “science says do this” (along with “government says do this” and “establishment journalism says this”), when there was so much uncertainty and nuance about what was known in an unfolding public health emergency. When a few weeks later, everyone was told they could stop doing that and had to start wearing masks, the damage to public trust in what scientists, the government and journalists were saying was damaged. And there’s a through-line between that kind of dynamic and vaccine hesitancy.

Again, helping the public understand what we know so far based on scientific research—and specifically how that research works and how it changes and strives to correct itself over time—can go along way in helping people understand the difference between the evidence anti-vaccine activists present to support their case and the body of evidence cited by thousands of scientists who’ve worked on these issues for decades.

How SciLine can help

SciLine’s staff includes a mix of scientists and journalists who work together to help journalists understand the value of stepping back from the political back-and-forth in news stories and turning to research-backed evidence and scientific expertise for reporting that’s as accurate and helpful to people as possible.

Sara Whitlock, SciLine scientific outreach manager

With the help of the rest of the SciLine team and a host of outside experts, development of SciLine’s new Vaccine Reporting Toolkit was led by scientific outreach manager Sara Whitlock, a biologist with a background in synthetic biology and microbiology. Before landing at SciLine, she spent time designing antimicrobial peptides, studying a flu-like disease called Q fever, and tackling HIV replication. These experiences led her to earn an M.S. in biophysics & structural biology from the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied how bacteria organize their insides.

Elements of the toolkit include:

• What every reporter needs to know about covering vaccines, including core vaccine concepts, best reporting practices, and understanding opposition to vaccination.
• Drivers of vaccine hesitancy and how news coverage affects it, covering everything from what vaccine hesitancy is, the main drivers of hesitancy, what does and does not work to address vaccine hesitancy, and the impact of news coverage on vaccine hesitancy.
• Reporting on vaccine mandates and policy in a polarized community, including what vaccine mandates are, why they were introduced, their efficacy, and the politicization of vaccine mandates.
• The most common vaccine conspiracy theories and misinformation, a rundown of the top 5-7 vaccine conspiracy theories, how they spread, and what journalists can do to counter these theories effectively.
• Religious and cultural resistance to vaccines, covering the communities that have higher rates of vaccine hesitancy, the drivers of that hesitancy, and ways journalists can reach these communities respectfully.

Other elements of SciLine’s work on vaccines that will continue to roll out this year include:

• A free Crash Course training session for journalists covering vaccines on Oct. 8. It will cover what vaccine effectiveness actually means; the effectiveness and safety profiles of different vaccines; how we know that vaccines are safe; tips for vetting science-related claims about vaccines; and best practices for addressing vaccine-related mis- and disinformation in your stories to correct false beliefs.
• A Spanish-language version of the toolkit and outreach to Spanish-language media in the U.S. led by Operations Manager Alana Rios and SciLine’s new engagement manager, Christian Monterrosa.
• Creation of social media-friendly infographics and short-form video that can be used or adapted by journalists.
• Outreach and engagement with independent content creators and social media influencers on the issue.
• Ongoing monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks driven by low vaccination rates, and state and local policy debates on the topic in order to support local news organizations covering those issues as they arise.

Founded in 2017, SciLine is philanthropically funded. Its work is made possible through a mix of individual donations and support from foundation funders including the Quadrivium Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, MAC3 Impact Philanthropies, The Eucalyptus Foundation, New Venture Fund, the Simons Foundation, Daniel Pinkel, the Zakaria Family Foundation, and the Leo Model Foundation.

SciLine is based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which was founded in 1848. AAAS is the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

Matt DeRienzo joined SciLine as director in November 2024 after more than 30 years as a reporter, editor, publisher, and journalism nonprofit leader. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of the Center for Public Integrity, a national nonprofit investigative news organization whose work under his tenure was recognized as a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Peabody Award nominee, du Pont Award winner and national Edward R. Murrow Award winner for General Excellence.