Sara Cooper and colleagues argue that a better understanding of the complex sociopolitical drivers of distrust in vaccination will increase the potential of social media to rebuild vaccine confidence
Vaccination experts have become increasingly alarmed about the continued waning of public confidence in vaccines.1 Social media are considered to be major contributors to this decline, facilitating the rapid and widespread sharing of misinformation, enabling vaccine anxieties and rumours to travel rapidly around the world.23 Social media are also seen to have enabled vocal anti-vaccination groups to self-organise and communicate well beyond their local areas.45 The covid-19 pandemic has only magnified these concerns,6 as Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization put it, “We’re not just fighting a pandemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.”7
This dominant narrative on mistrust in vaccines assumes that it is primarily the result of a lack of information, and therefore if individuals are provided with knowledge about the benefits and value of vaccines, uptake will rise. However, public health research from a critical social science perspective has highlighted the limitations of this view, which is referred to as a “knowledge deficit” framing.89101112 Critical social science analyses power structures and relations with the aim of unsettling widely held assumptions and uncovering the roots to health problems that lie within social systems and institutions.13 It has shown that the dominant model on vaccine mistrust obscures the contexts shaping how people interpret and respond to information, often critically, along with the socio-political drivers of vaccine confidence that are not related to knowledge.10 Ultimately, it has highlighted that the roots of declining public confidence in vaccines are potentially deeper and more complex than concerns about social media would have us believe.