How to cover a vaccine conspiracy in your community

When a fear-inducing message about vaccine ingredients or a conspiracy about hidden vaccine harms is circulating in your community, what should reporters do?

Take steps to share accurate information while following these best practices:

• Communicate the scientific consensus with supportive quotes from scientists and/or physicians and findings from peer-reviewed research, expressed in accessible language.
• Employ “prebunking” by providing accurate information about a concept as soon as you see it spread in your community, while also warning your audience to be on the lookout for incorrect or misleading information on the topic. For more details on how to prebunk, see this in-depth guide from the University of Cambridge and BBC.
• Tell a story that can engage people cognitively and emotionally. Research has shown that contextualizing facts with an illustrative, emotionally engaging anecdote or telling a conversion story (“I used to be anti-vaccine”) can be a powerful vehicle for accurate information, whether the speaker is a parent, physician, patient, or someone else.
• Use trusted messengers as sources. They can include religious, community, or business leaders as well as local politicians, grassroots activists, influential parents, physicians or pharmacists, or other local influencers. Including these messengers in stories about vaccines can help build trust with audiences and reinforce accurate information.
• Strike a balance with technical information, explaining as much as audiences need to know in lay language without going overboard.

And be careful to avoid these pitfalls:

• Make sure the claim you’re debunking is worthwhile to address. Covering claims that aren’t widely believed risks unnecessarily amplifying them (a variation of the Streisand effect).
  

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• Avoid restating a “myth” or misconception and instead phrase it as a question or state the actual factual information. This avoids inadvertently reinforcing the false information, a phenomenon known as the illusory truth effect.
• Avoid employing false balance, where different, opposing perspectives are presented as equally valid when the evidence supporting them is not actually equal. See this excellent toolkit from Voices for Vaccines on avoiding false balance with vaccine information.
• Avoid a singular focus on correcting factual information, which is not sufficient alone to counter beliefs in misinformation—a concept called the deficit model. To create a compelling narrative, share relevant stories and quote experts as you include correct information.
• Don’t shame or blame people who have questions about vaccines. Shaming or blaming people who question or refuse vaccines is ineffective, especially compared to actually addressing people’s concerns. Instead, it can backfire by stigmatizing and isolating people, making them less likely to engage with experts on health information, or by giving them attention and increasing their platform.

Further reading: Common vaccine misconceptions and online tactics used by the anti-vax movement