Children’s Headaches: Parents’ Reliance on Fake News of Vaccination
By: Teck Fong
Tags: Anti Vaccination, Fake News, Persuasion, Parents

Convincing parents to register for vaccination is a shared pain among adults.

With the convenience of smartphones, many parents have learned to use social media apps and those functions, such as sending photos (you know, those with lotus), joining group chats, and sharing information. While being social media iterate is good, it has come to most of our (the children) attention that parents had learned some false information of vaccination from those group chats.

The Malaysian government and World Health Organization (WHO) made clear statements: the advantage of vaccination outweighed without it on a large scale, and chances of getting severe side effects of vaccines are extremely low. However, parents tended to believe in folktales. From the conspiracy of mind-manipulating chip hidden in the vaccine to only could take a certain brand of vaccine. Their reliance on that false information is worrying on the current worldwide matter.

Why do they concern about those fake news?

The side effects of vaccines written on fake news are dreadful. Those messages built the impression that as if those pro-vaccines are submitting themselves to severe health issues. Imagine reading these messages on the daily basis, how much more negative impression could be built on vaccination?

Those false messages nit-picked on the consequences of vaccines. Non-professionals wrote in an elaborated length of getting blood clots and deviating from the discussion of vaccine to discuss the consequence of blood clots.

It’s more like they are threatened with the information rather than reading to make an informed decision to be vaccinated.

Fake news undermined the ability to evaluate the validity of the information.

Reading these messages narrowed the readers’ attention to the description of the side effects. Making them not attend to other information: It’s a very low chance these could happen, and your health is more at risk if you are not vaccinated.

It could be scary to receive messages like this, especially when it directly relates to our health. It is almost like a threats message that implicitly stating ‘your health is at risk when you are vaccinated.’

Not to mention when youngsters receive such a message, it startled us for a while before we could critically appraise the source of the information to affirm its validity.

When their children were always on the protesting side and they are worried about their children’s health, these messages had almost no missing rate in making them believe in it.

“They are so stubborn, they never listen to me.”

This is our shared pain.

Spending weeks and months just to let them know that getting vaccinated is far better than without it, at the end just receive a response that turned the whole foundation of knowledge building back to square zero.

Some children would inform their parents on how to spot fake news: beware of information with no publication source, check the validity of the source of information, and google the information to check for multiple publications. But we all know how it ended up.

Stay calm

It might take some time for the advice to work. Yes some of us had tried more months, even missing out on the opportunity to apply for the alternative road for the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Holding the thought in mind ‘our parents should receive vaccines to protect themselves, we need to bear with the blames and scolding. It hurts a lot more when it came from parents.

It is not pleasant, but we need to know that as time passes, they would come to an understanding that getting vaccinated is the primary choice of protecting themselves and those around them.