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The mistrust that is transmitted to the memory of many populations is related to the absence of a code of conduct in the testing of designed vaccines. Photo REUTERS / Henry Nicholls
“Statistics and vaccines were invented around the same time, 250 years ago.” With this fact as the “key” to understanding the skepticism of many people about vaccines, our conversation begins with the professor of Informatics at Wellesley College, USA, Panagiotis Metaxas, who decodes the movement of vaccinators, analyzing digital data and using social science tools. “The human mind works best when it has to deal with binary logic, when it is called upon to choose between good and evil, black and white,” says Mr. Metaxas. Therefore, we tend to simplify the data, in our mind we want the vaccine to “save or kill”. However, the mode of action of the vaccine is essentially based on the law of probability. “Then we don’t get the vaccine and we automatically get immunity, we simply have less chance of getting seriously ill and more of not getting sick at all”, emphasizes the Greek professor, “but it is difficult to think with possibilities, it is a limitation of the human mind. “Also, as a rule, we make decisions not on the basis of logic but on the basis of emotion, even for the most serious problems.” Even if one has heard all the logical arguments in favor of vaccination, often one you may suddenly change your mind simply because you have been emotionally moved by a story about one person’s side effects. ”
The etymology of the word vaccina, vaccina, also reveals its origin, from vacca which in Latin means… cow. “The first vaccine that was invented was smallpox and it arose from the observation that the human body was developing antibodies against smallpox if it had previously been infected with vaccinia, that is, cowpox,” he said. they agreed to put something on his body that came from a cow ”. Others refused to harm an animal. “Gaddy did not accept that you make an animal and that a cow suffers in the hope that you will get better,” says Mr. Metaxas, “so I had written a dissertation with seven arguments, on which people should not make vaccines.” But when a smallpox epidemic broke out in India 15 years later and children began to die en masse, he regretted it and wrote that in the end “it shouldn’t be so straight, because now I feel like people have died from my own words.”
The idea of the vaccine initially surprised many. Complications that were sometimes associated with and sometimes did not contribute to recommending a vaccine. “At the time, it was not even known that any tool that comes into contact with the human body must be sterilized, resulting in vaccinations with infected needles,” says the professor. However, the mistrust that has passed into the collective memory of many populations is related to the total absence of a code of conduct in the testing of drugs and vaccines in design. The “black pages” in the history of medical research are about experiments that began in the 1940s in Alabama, the United States, and Guatemala, with the ultimate goal of finding a cure for syphilis.
In modern times, a wave of controversy has been sparked by the publication in Great Britain in 1985 of a scientific article linking the mumps vaccine to the development of autism in children. “The previous study was not sufficiently substantiated and subsequent studies completely overturned its reasoning,” says Metaxas, “but it gained a lot of publicity, as it was welcomed by many left-wing Americans and well-known Hollywood actors, who had a step and an audience” . This belief is still widespread among those who deny vaccines. “The man like ‘being pseudological’ likes to give simple interpretations of everything, he cannot accept that some things happen for random reasons, such as DNA mutation.” Surveys in the United States until recently linked attitudes about vaccines to political beliefs.
In our case, an exhaustive analysis of the conversations over three days on the Greek Twitter with the Twitter Trails tool, developed by Mr. Metaxas in his laboratory, yielded quite reassuring results. “We found 3,000 tweets from 1,200 users, who used the word ‘vaccines’, a relatively low number, which indicates that at this stage the discussion has probably stopped a bit, at least on Twitter,” he told “K”; those who come from both ends of the ideological spectrum and challenge vaccines with different arguments, and a third who primarily mimics the issue of vaccines. “A troll account and form appear to be systematically trying to confuse the issue by promoting fake news. the center of attention is Bill Gates, the Jews, Albert Bourla, Elias Mosialos and to the surprise of analysts Takis Tsoukalas, due to his recent statement on vaccines, which received a series of retweets.
