Good News to End a Hard Year
By: The Dynamic Online Networks Lab
Tags: Misinformation, Vaccines, Coronavirus, Covid 19, Health

By Kristin Levine and Rhys Leahy

On this blog, we tend to focus on online divisiveness, conspiracy theories, and pernicious pieces of health misinformation. We spend most of our year shining searchlights on the internet for these phenomena and hoping they won’t breach the online fringes to reach a mainstream mass. Going into the new year, we want our last post of 2020 to showcase a few examples of great outreach from healthcare workers and public health agencies that sparked constructive online conversations around vaccines.

How’d they do it so quickly?

This pro-vaccine Facebook page promoted the scientific an regulatory process around vaccines to parents in Michigan. This post was discovered through CrowdTangle, a public insights tool owned by Facebook.

Historically, when a new vaccine was in development, researchers only produced enough doses of the vaccine for participants in the safety and efficacy trials. In a traditional timeline, vaccine production only ramps up to a scale that could cover the rest of the population after a vaccine is approved by a regulatory agency like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the European Medicines Agency. This makes sense from a business perspective — why manufacture a vaccine that may not be successful? If the trials fail, you’d have to just throw all those doses away.

However, in the middle of a pandemic, those extra few months to ramp up production are precious — and potentially deadly — to those waiting on a vaccine. Operation Warp Speed took a different approach to expedite vaccine development and distribution. Instead of speeding up the scientific research and clinic trial part of the process, this initiative sped up the manufacturing part of the process.

Rather than waiting to start manufacturing, the team leading Operation Warp Speed “bet” on a set of vaccine candidates and gambled on funding their production before approval. Basically, this interagency initiative absorbed the risk of manufacturing several different vaccine candidates — hoping at least a couple of them would be approved — so that a vaccine would be ready for distribution as soon as science says it is safe and effective.

Here’s a quote from Health and Human Services’ own page about Operation Warp Speed, explaining more:

“Rather than eliminating steps from traditional development timelines, steps will proceed simultaneously, such as starting manufacturing of the vaccine at industrial scale well before the demonstration of vaccine efficacy and safety as happens normally. This increases the financial risk, but not the product risk.”

And another explanation from Bloomberg:

“The project will cost billions of dollars…. And it will almost certainly result in significant waste by making inoculations at scale before knowing if they’ll be safe and effective — meaning that vaccines that fail will be useless. But it could mean having doses of vaccine available for the American public by the end of this year, instead of by next summer.”

Now we can see this gamble starting to pay off. The Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were approved within the last two weeks and already over half a million doses and counting have been administered in the U.S. You can watch the vaccine rollout for each state with the NBC and Johns Hopkins vaccine trackers. It’s even more fun than the weather app.

Basic Research to the Rescue!

It’s true that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are the first to use mRNA, but they aren’t a completely new technology. As we discussed in our last post, researchers have been investigating mRNA vaccines and treatments for other diseases for over a decade. Recently, a physician in a pro-vax group did a fantastic job sharing why she’s not worried about the safety of mRNA vaccines:

A physician openly discussed her trust in the vaccine development process on Facebook. Her post was shared across pro-vaccine pages and encourages people to discuss any hesitancy with their primary care doctor.

To further support her argument:

Combating Misinformation

On Facebook, the CDC has been addressing concerns that getting a COVID-19 vaccine could infect you with the virus. They address the “kernel of truth” problem head-on by acknowledging that some people do get a fever after receiving a vaccine. Rather than interpreting a fever as a sign that they have somehow “caught” the virus, the CDC encourages people to see this as a normal part of getting a vaccine — and even possibly a good sign that their immune system is working properly.

Here, the CDC uses Facebook to share their message with a wide audience and get out ahead of misinformation around live viruses or side effects. This post was discovered on CrowdTangle.

Their link takes you to another website with more “Facts about COVID-19 Vaccines.” There, the site does an excellent job addressing another common piece of misinformation — that receiving one of the new mRNA vaccines will somehow “alter” your DNA.

It’s clever how the bold print heading reinforces the fact rather than the myth. Then it provides a brief explanation of why this is true. It doesn’t talk down to readers; instead it simply tries to educate the reader about something that is honestly, a little bit difficult to understand. If that paragraph isn’t convincing enough, it provides another link where the reader can learn more — a page dedicated to discussing mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

TikTok for Science

And finally, you might want to check out Alex Dainis. She has a PhD in Genetics from Standard University and wrote her dissertation on RNA. She’s also a video producer and she’s been making TikTok videos explaining common questions about Covid vaccines, including “What’s in an RNA Vaccine?” and “RNA/Won’t Change DNA.”

On top of all their efforts this year, healthcare workers, researchers, and public health agencies have strived to share their medical expertise and personal experiences with broader online communities across social media. This kind of interpersonal outreach helps build trust in vaccines and science and brings all of us closer to ending the pandemic.