Anti-vaccination groups ‘targeting new parents online’

Anti-vaccination groups are using social media to spread discredited science to parents, according to a new report.

Four in ten parents with small children surveyed by the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) for their Moving the Needle report said they had seen negative messages online about vaccines.

“This rose to 50% for parents with children under five, when most vaccinations are offered,” says The Times.

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In November, a US-based “anti-vax” group was censured by the Advertising Standards Authority over a promoted Facebook post which claimed that “any vaccine given at any age [can] kill your child”.

The paid-for post, which also claimed that “if this unthinkable tragedy does occur, doctors will dismiss it as ‘sudden infant death syndrome’”, was targeted to new parents using Facebook’s ad technology.

“The ASA ruled that the post was misleading advertising and likely to cause fear and distress,” says The Guardian.

The vast majority of British parents - nine out of ten surveyed by the RSPH - agreed that vaccines were important for their children’s health.

However, among those who chose not to vaccinate their children, “fear of side effects… was consistently found to be the primary reason”, says the report.

The anti-vaccination movement arose in response to a now-discredited 1998 paper by British doctor Andrew Wakefield in which he claimed that vaccines put children at a higher risk of developing autism.

Although any link between vaccination and medical disorders has been thoroughly rejected by the mainstream scientific establishment, the number of parents choosing not to vaccinate their children has grown in recent years.

Measles rates in Europe are at a 20-year high, and the preventable disease claimed dozens of lives last year.

Last week, the World Health Organisation (WHO) listed “vaccine hesitancy” alongside ebola and antibiotic resistance as among the ten most dangerous public health threats facing the world in 2019.

The WHO said its own research highlighted “complacency, inconvenience in accessing vaccines, and lack of confidence” in their safety as key factors for parents who failed to have their children vaccinated.

The organisation added that vaccines currently prevent between two and three million deaths per year globally.