Vax comm part 1: Feelings don’t care about your facts

TC Talk

Vax comm part 1: Feelings don't care about your facts

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In general, what works and doesn’t work when it comes to vaccine communication? How does the COVID vaccine controversy compare to past vaccine controversies?

Sources and further reading

American Academy of Arts & Sciences. (Nov. 9, 2020). Seth Mnookin: Earning Trust in the Age of the Pandemic. Retrieved July 30, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz3ZQAQKfJQ
Hay, M. (2020, December 14). The ‘Terrorgram’ Plot by Neo-Nazis to Seduce Anti-Vaxxers. The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/anti-vaxxer-panic-about-the-pfizer-coronavirus-vaccine-meets-neo-nazi-fantasies-in-corona-chan
Mnookin, S. (2012). The panic virus: The true story behind the vaccine-autism controversy. Simon and Schuster.
“The Rush for Ivermectin.” (Sep. 23, 20210). What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future. Apple Podcasts. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rush-for-ivermectin/id1302281912?i=1000534204040

Transcript

A	[Singing] Oops. I’ll have to cut that.
B	Yeah of course you will.
A	Welcome to TC Talk. I am Abi
B	and I am Benton.
A	TC talk stands for Technical Communication Talk. I am a Technical Communication professor and I am sharing my scholarly reading findings with my not-professor partner.
B	Correct.
A	But it’s safe to say that you are a scientist.
B	Yes, you can say that.
A	Philosophically at least, you love science. You’re always reading about it.
B	I do that, yes.
A	And so you have consumed your fair share of scientific and technical communication.
B	Indeed.
A	So you bring in part a lay person perspective, but also the perspective of someone who is very interested in scientific and technical topics.
B	Sure.
A	All right, shall we toast? And what have we got going on?
B	Strawberry margaritas.
A	False.
B	Martinis.
A	Extra false.
B	My goodness.
A	Daiquiris.
B	Strawberry daiquiris made from home grown strawberries that have traveled no more than a hundred feet total.
A	We’re eating and drinking local. Before I forget, I was listening to our last episode about aliens and what’s his name?
B	Andy Weir.
A	Thank you. And I realized that we talked about Star Trek on more than one occasion within that conversation. And yet you never deployed your Picard impression.
B	So what are you telling me? Are you telling me to “make it so, number one”?
A	Precisely. And I invite you to use this impression at any at all points throughout our conversation today just to make up for it.
B	Excellent Dr. Crusher. I mean, Bakke.
A	Okay.
B	So you’ve been you’ve been doing a lot of reading lately I’ve noticed. How is your reading going?
A	Okay. So like call back to episode one where we were talking about how to read and are my strategies working? Yes and no. What has been working is having this podcast because I plowed through a bunch of pretty in-depth reading these last couple of days because I knew it was on the calendar that we were going to do this recording. And so I made it happen. I completely redid my home office. So now it is an office versus a multipurpose room that had started to become a storage room, repainted the thing, got myself a standing desk. So I have lots of options for where to read.
B	You had someone put your standing desk together for you?
A	Okay. I did it like 90 percent of the way. And then you came in. Did I not? Oh, okay. I did it 90% of the way, backwards.
B	Oh right.
A	And then I had to have you fix my work. Thank you for that.
B	You’re welcome.
A	I consider that a fail of technical communication because I was very closely following the manual, which didn’t have any words, just pictures. If it had had words, maybe it would be better. So I have a place that I enjoy reading and my cat enjoys, not reading, but being with me as I read, which makes it all the better. I have done some of my 20 minute reading sprints, so to speak, for when I’m really not feeling like it.
B	Okay.
A	And the other thing that I need to start implementing is no social media before noon. And it sounds kind of arbitrary. But what happens is I wake up and I think oh I’m just going to check Instagram or Twitter.
B	And then, and then you check the other one, and then you have to check social media again because something might have happened.
A	Uh-huh.
B	And then it’s time for lunch and you’re like, What happened to the morning? Why do I even get out of bed?
A	Thanks for asking.
B	You’re welcome. So what are your thoughts on vaccines?
A	You want to talk about vaccines today?
B	Yeah.
A	Well, what a coincidence. That’s actually the topic I had planned for today.
B	What?!
A	What my thoughts about vaccines are that they are generally a good thing. My thoughts about vaccine communication are all over the place.
B	Meaning your thoughts are highly nuanced or they’re completely chaotic?
A	Kind of both. Part of me recognizes the need for nuance. Like that’s what we’re all about in rhetoric – context! But there’s another part of me that is really angry and has lost all patience with people who aren’t getting vaccinated against COVID right now. Sorry to use this cliche, but there’s like the angel on one shoulder saying have empathy for these people and recognize the nuance of their decision-making. And then there’s the devil on my other shoulder that’s like to heck with it. I’m, there’s no polite way to say how I feel about the situation, so I’ll just put it this way. I’m fed up. But honestly, my feelings about the situation don’t matter.
B	Hmm? That sounds like a right-wing talking point.
A	Fuck your feelings?
B	That one.
A	Oh no, no. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Which is really interesting as a right-wing talking point. Feelings don’t care about your facts is more like it. No, no. Actually, that’s a great summary of what health communicators and technical communicators should, a stance they should take towards vaccine communication is feelings don’t care about your facts. And we’ll get into that more. But back to my point that my feelings don’t matter. It it’s because, and I, I say this to my students. Do you want to be right? Or do you want to make a difference? And also be right in parentheses. And my point there is that there’s a sort of personal satisfaction that comes with debunking and winning an argument and proving people wrong and throwing the science textbook at them. Right?
B	It’s glorious. Yes, this is the age of digging in.
A	Yeah, Not only are you not going to persuade, but they might dig in more because they’re being hashtag persecuted or something.
B	Shields up.
A	The goal is not the personal satisfaction of having won an argument. The goal is to create change in the world. To do what it takes to get more people to get the COVID vaccine so that we can get out of this goddamn pandemic.
B	The quarantine quagmire.
A	Nice alliteration. And so with all this conflict in my brain about the situation, I wanted to do some reading about it. What does the research say? And see if I can pull some answers from that. I’m sad to say I have not emerged with the answer to anti-vaccination. But at least I have a sense of what tends to work and what tends not to work. What’s your first thought when you think of persuading someone to get a vaccine, what do you think would work?
B	Maybe knocking them out and giving them the vaccine?
A	Okay. So completely bypassing human agency and consent?
B	I don’t really mean that. I might begin by asking a person if they had ever gotten the flu shot. “Yeah, it never worked. I got the flu anyway.” And then I could counter with That’s because there is such a high mutation rate of the flu that it’s something like 40 percent effective.
A	So you would start by talking about how ineffective vaccines are? Smart.
B	That would get them on my side!
A	And all the while throwing statistics and scientific terminology at them.
B	Then I, then I would say that there is only one Coronavirus like that hasn’t had enough chance to mutate to get away from us the way that the flu has. It is 95 percent effective at preventing the disease. And in the remaining 5%, it lessens the symptoms of the illness. As opposed to the crap shoot of the flu shot.
A	So you’re starting with an assumption that people’s experience with the flu shot is informing their skepticism about the COVID vaccine.
B	I can see there being a logical connection between getting the flu shot and then getting the flu and being like, forget this Corona thing. Vaccines don’t work because I get the flu vaccine, I get the flu.
A	That’s probably a really narrow subset of people though who don’t get the COVID vaccine. So my suggestion would be to listen to what they have to say first.
B	Oh.
A	That’s how you learn what their actual thought process is versus coming in with assumptions and statistics.
B	Guns blazing.
A	Yeah, yeah. But that’s hard, that’s hard to listen. And it’s hard to empathize. And I’m scared to empathize honestly because to truly empathize would mean to engage in thinking and arguments that, that I am very opposed to.
B	Agreed.
A	And so I think there’s a role for empathy here for sure. But where, where do you stop? Like where do you draw the line? Like, I can empathize with this, but not that. Or this kind of person, but not that kind of person. Like I can empathize with a parent… And, and this is kind of going back in time to the, the MMR autism non-link controversy. But I can empathize with a parent who is dealing with a child who’s come down with a major condition or symptoms that can’t otherwise be explained and they’re looking for answers. I cannot empathize with Andrew Wakefield. Do you know who that is?
B	He’s the British doctor who cooked up some goofy idea that the MMR vaccine can cause autism.
A	Yeah, and he never drew that direct connection. He was very careful about that, but by implication, he drew that connection. And parents picked up on it and he fashioned himself as an advocate for these parents and no one else will listen to them. And so that was really his shtick, I guess,
B	Secret knowledge against the system.
A	Oh yeah. Yeah. And this is 1990s, I want to say. He published an article in The Lancet, making this specious connection which has been widely debated, retracted, debunked, and yet the ideas survive beyond it. And when you really dig into it, you can see the motivations that Wakefield had to push these myths. So this Lancet study had a sample of 12 participants, children. And he failed to disclose that most of those participants were essentially fed to him by a law firm that was working on putting together a lawsuit. He stood to benefit financially. But the grifters, in this situation, the people who should know better and who are actively pushing misinformation, I don’t have any patience for them. I’m not going to empathize with them.
B	Right.
A	But it’s really, really hard to distinguish between, yeah, Between the grifters who are knowingly twisting or fabricating information for their own benefit and to the detriment of individuals and society. And on the other side, there’s these parents who are feeling helpless. And they are searching for community and just a sense of validation and being listened to. But what’s tricky is that if you think of that as a continuum, I think it’s difficult to disentangle those sometimes because I think if somebody pushes a lie hard enough, they probably start to believe it themselves. But does that make it okay? Not necessarily. And it’s really difficult to recognize your own biases that may be motivating why you believe in something versus something else. But at the same time, I don’t think that teaching people about cognitive biases is the solution either. It’s probably part of it. And so in general, a good question to ask is, who’s benefiting from this message being spread? It doesn’t always help you pinpoint who’s responsible or who’s wrong or who was right. But it could be a helpful guide post. I’ll give you an example. Have you heard of the boogaloo boys?
B	I don’t think so.
A	Really? Okay, they’re a white supremacist group.
B	Oh.
A	And they would consider themselves accelerationists. So there is a group of people who think that we essentially need to burn society to the ground and build something new. And that’s the only way to achieve the best society possible. And so they want to hasten the end of the world, so to speak.
B	So they can remake it in their own image.
A	Yeah, white, male, et cetera.
B	Hard to build a whole society male.
A	No joke. And I bring this up because they stand to benefit from people not getting vaccinated. Because that leads to more chaos and gets closer to the goal of the downfall of society.
B	Woohoo!
A	And so they have been creating anti-vax misinformation and spreading it to groups that already have vaccine- skeptical tendencies. Those audiences, or because digital information is so decontextualized, they don’t necessarily know the source.
B	Like cotton-eye Joe. Where did you come from? Where did you go? And specifically speaking to memes like humor, entertainment, even if you realize like, Yes, this isn’t true. It’s still entertaining, it’s still embeds in your brain and it puts the seeds of doubt in.
A	Yeah, you’re totally right. That even just being exposed to misinformation, even in the context of debunking it, that still makes it stick in your brain. And there is research that shows that people forget the source of information. The claim itself gets disconnected from the fact of whether it’s true or false. Enough prelude.
B	This was all prelude?!
A	Okay, you’re, good, good call. I should say, Enough conversation that is not supported by specific research. Because I do want to talk about a couple of specific things that I read.
B	Reading. That’s right. That’s how we started this.
A	That’s kind of the whole point of this, really. So the two books I read, the first one is by Seth Mnookin and it’s called The Panic Virus. This was from 2011. And the second book I’m gonna talk about is Heidi Lawrence’s Vaccine Rhetorics. The first book is more of a popular press.
B	Okay.
A	And the second book is more of an academic book.
B	So what did you find?
A	Well, the first thing I should note is that obviously these books, while about vaccines do not address our current context of COVID.
B	Right.
A	Which is very different in some ways from the contexts these books do describe. But nonetheless,
B	and for the sake of posterity, the difference is that in the case of talking about vaccine hesitancy previous to COVID, general public was not so anti-vaccine.
A	Yeah, that’s part of it
B	It was viewed as highly fringe at those times and now it’s mainstream to a large portion of America.
A	Yeah.
B	Sadly.
A	And I would say that vaccine skepticism was not mainstream per se, but more than fringe, if that makes sense, it kind of grew out of these discussion groups and conferences, got picked up by mainstream media and became something that everyone was at least aware of. I would say another difference, and this is a major difference, and it has to do with the influence of, and I hate to say this, but everyone will know what I mean when I say it. Fake news.
B	What’s fake news?
A	I did write an article about it, about the very phrase fake news and why it’s limited and we shouldn’t use it. And here I am. I am such a hypocrite.
B	Yes, You are such a hypocrite. We cannot believe a word from your mouth!
A	But yeah, the Internet was definitely a contributor to MMR vaccine hesitancy. For sure. But I think the situation is just all the more extreme in America today. What with QAnon, and
B	Do we dare say the name that shall not be named?
A	That last president we had, you know who.
B	Voldemort?
A	Yeah. Elected leaders, eroding trust in the traditionally trusted institutions like the CDC. And openly undercutting science.
B	To be fair, openly undercutting science is not something that has been historically limited to one party.
A	You’re referring to climate change, right?
B	That is probably the best example. What the Union of Concerned Scientists has said. Like they have been looking at science and how it has been ignored, disregarded, or minimized by presidents going all the way back to Eisenhower, they have documented instances of this.
A	Yeah, I totally believe that. Avoiding scientific findings, that’s one thing. But what happened with the Trump administration was the politicizing of science and the politicizing of this issue. And that I think is, was huge in setting the stage for this mass vaccine denial. And I even remember in early 2020, when Italy was going off the rails…
B	How early?
A	New York was experiencing a huge outbreak. So this was before it directly affected me. But I was thinking, please don’t make this political, please don’t make this political. And I thought, yeah, Trump is awful, but even he should be able to see that this is not a political thing. But I was much too optimistic. I’m allowed to hope that things aren’t going to go to shit. But they did. And here we are. So that whole context that is different, especially because the childhood vaccine skepticism has been largely liberal parents, like wealthy, white, progressive,
B	Privileged.
A	Yeah, yeah, for sure. And those are the folks who you are not hearing the vaccine skepticism from now. On the whole. I’m sure there are exceptions. Another big difference is the fact that COVID is here and it is indiscriminate and it is ravaging our country. And thousands upon thousands of people have died.
B	Hundreds of thousands of Americans. On the contrary, measles? Pfff. What even is Rubella? Do we know?
A	Precisely. And one of the points that Mnookin makes, to get back to the reading, is that the more effective vaccines are, the less necessary they seem. Because the risk feels so distant.
B	There must be a time element to that statement though. Because, you know, that memory is going to live on in, in people for 20 years and they’re going to be like, Yes, my kid is getting the coronavirus vaccine. Absolutely. As soon as they can.
A	Yeah. So you would think that the more present a disease is, the more likely people would be willing to get vaccinated for it. But the COVID situation is completely turning that assumption on its head. Like I know of people who have gotten COVID, been hospitalized for it. Yet come out of that experience still against the vaccine. And insisting it was the horse dewormer that cured them. Versus the modern medical system whose resources you sucked up needlessly by not getting vaccinated.
B	I bet that horse dewormer manufacturer is like, yes please!
A	Well here’s the, here’s the thing. They have put out a statement saying this does not cure COVID.
B	But you know what they’re not doing? Halting production.
A	Well, horses still need to be dewormed. Think about the horses!
B	Think about the horses. Think about the children. Think about the horse children? That sounds like a foal’s errand.
A	So all that to say.
B	That was gold! Come on. Come on.
A	Okay. Say it again.
B	Think about the horse children? No, that’s a foal’s errand.
A	You said foal’s errand. Now it makes sense why that was a joke.
B	Ugh.
A	You’re funny. Good job.
B	Thanks.
A	It’s rare, but I’ll acknowledge it when it happens.
B	Oh burn. It burns.
A	So all that to say the books that I read don’t directly correspond to our current situation. But there’s still value, I think, in getting a really detailed history and context of anti-vaccination. And I think the, The Panic Virus, I think it was a really good book. It was really long and really footnoted.
B	For a popular press book?
A	Yeah. But I think it would be really good to assign in a class about like science writing. It’s a good example of research-based science writing. And at the same time, it reveals a lot of the flaws with the way that scientific and medical information is communicated to the public. So the first part of the book was a lot of that history, which was actually super interesting. And I am super hot. And so we’re going to pause and pick this up later.
B	Wunderbar.