Whatever your position on childhood vaccinations, a new report provides very solid documentation of the role played by various antivax pressure groups to sway public opinion using a variety of online social media platforms. The report is a joint effort of two non-profit organizations, the Sabin Vaccine Institute and the Aspen Institute. I haven’t read the entire report, “Meeting the Challenge of Vaccination Hesitancy,” (a copy linked to at the end of this post) but want to focus on its last chapter, a paper written by Renée DiResta and Claire Wardle. DiResta is a cybersecurity researcher at Stanford, Wardle is a TED fellow and US director of First Draft. Their paper examines the changing policies of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other online platforms towards the antivax movement.

There is no doubt that this movement has created a global health crisis, even before Covid appeared. Doubts about polio and measles vaccines have created new outbreaks of this disease in places such as Brooklyn, Samoa and Italy, among other places. Both of these diseases were considered cured just a few years ago and rarely seen anywhere. That all has changed as a result of increasing opposition to vaccinating children.

Part of the problem is the asymmetric relationship between pro- and antivax groups: the provax folks use mostly medical literature and poorly designed public health websites; the antivax folks use well-thought out videos, catchy Internet memes and powerful personal anecdotes to make their points. Having just a few global social media platforms means the antivaxxers can spread their message more easily too. The antivaxxers also give the impression that they are the sole trusted source of information about vaccines, which isn’t helped by the several missteps over Covid over the past few months from the CDC and WHO. It also helps that several celebrities have been pushing the antivax message, which gets further amplified by mainstream media.

The authors wrote: “To counter online misinformation, we must understand how the rumors, conspiracy theories, and misleading content that we see in digital spaces intersects with existing barriers to vaccination in different countries.” The researchers took screenshots of how people searched for vaccine information in different countries and compared those results with the official policies of the social media platforms. Not surprisingly, things didn’t line up. There are “real concerns which still exist about whether these promised changes to vaccine-related policies are having the desired effect.” For example, a search for the term “vaccines” on Instagram in February 2020  produced top results that were disproportionately pushing antivax positions, even though Instagram instituted changes to reduce this misinformation almost a year earlier.

“Anti-vaccination activists have gained a deep understanding of how to communicate
effectively on social platforms and have developed techniques to take advantage of their unique characteristics, such as groups, ads, and trending topics,” they wrote. That is a depressing situation.

Another problem is that the state health departments are largely in charge of vaccination programs, and the antivaxxers are very organized at the state level to pressure their legislators to enact laws supporting their point of view. “The ability of the pro-vaccine community to tell a more compelling story more persuasively and to spread its evidence-based message to broader audiences online is an imperative for public health,” conclude the researchers.

https://www.sabin.org/sites/sabin.org/files/sabin-aspen-report-2020_meeting_the_challenge_of_vaccine_hesitancy.pdf

A friend of mine has been noting several of her family’s key performance indicators (KPIs) during the Covid Times. Things like how many minutes her family collectively naps and exercises each day, or the number of days they have cooked dinner together (vs. getting takeout) or total episodes of Tiger King they have watched. At first I thought it was very cute and clever but now I think this idea is worth a closer look. After months under lockdown, we all need some solid data to measure how we are holding up under the strain. And you all know how much of a data nerd I am.

This week the NY Times published its own instructive “pandemic rules”. The piece included accounting for the number of close contacts, managing your exposure “budget” and keeping higher-risk activities as short as possible. All are worthy goals.

Here are a few more of the ones that I have discovered from my wife and I being under lockdown.

1. Number of bottles of wines remaining before resupply. Early on in the Covid period, we didn’t venture out for anything. I wanted to order at my favorite wine shop and pickup at the curb. Their website was terrible and it took forever to find things that would have taken me about 15 minutes if I was shopping at the physical store. Thankfully we aren’t big drinkers but we will eventually have to restock.
2. Rolls of toilet paper remaining on hand. No more needs to be said of this.
3. Instacart fulfillment wait times. When we began in March, we already were big users of Instacart for grocery delivery. Orders which were usually filled within hours of completing the carts suddenly took days or even a week as newbies jumped on board this system. Thankfully they have gotten things back under control and now are back to a few hours to fill.
4. Teenage eye rolls per day. Thankfully we are empty nesters, otherwise the first metric might have to be adjusted. But hearing from parents of teens who are sheltered together more has been interesting. Some teens are finding out what mom and dad actually “do” during the work day instructive, and perhaps are more sympathetic when sharing the communal “office.”
5. Number of Zoom minutes consumed by non-work activities. As Zoom has become the de facto connective and social tissue of our lives, its use varies depending on our social needs.
6. Steps. We have always tracked our daily step count, but finding places to walk where you aren’t dodging folks can be tricky.
7. Proportion of non-masked people encountered. Across our region this varies by place, time of day and other factors. Hard to have any hard and fast rules here. But we both are using them as much as possible when we are out.

If you have suggestions on other metrics to determine progress, do share in the comments.

Given that we are all at home, I was thinking the other day of some of my favorite museums that I have visited during better times. As long-time readers might remember, I am a big fan of the Henry Ford Museum outside of Detroit. I was reminded of all the treasures in their collection when the news broke this week that GE was finally selling off its light bulb division to  Savant, a smart home company. GE had this division for more than a century, and it had been losing money on it for several years.

The light bulb is an iconic product for the company that was founded by Thomas Edison. But the real innovation happened not when Edison came up with the initial invention, but about improvements to how they were made. Back in the 1880s, glassblowers were able to create a bulb every 30 seconds if they got good at doing them. Moving forward thirty years, engineers had developed machines that could produce perhaps ten or twenty bulbs a minute. But that wasn’t fast enough, particularly as electrification was growing quickly.

It took a master glassblower working with a mechanical engineer from Corning to come up with a truly novel idea. A heated ribbon of glass went through a machine that could stamp out hundreds of bulbs per minute. The resulting equipment literally replaced entire factories, and this is what is on display at the Ford Museum. (Parts of Edison’s Menlo Park lab are also on display there too.) Of course, this machine also put legions of glassblowers out of work.

A GE engineer would go on to invent the LED bulb in the 1960s, which was the eventual undoing of incandescent bulbs. Actually, there were LEDs before this time, but they only output infrared light. This invention figured out how to output visible light, and sixty years later we have LED bulbs that can output thousands of colors controlled from our smartphones, from Phillips and Savant, the company that acquired the GE lighting assets.

Check out some of these innovative LED designs that I came across online. And if you ever get the opportunity to visit the museum, you will find it a delight and well worth your time.