$1,000,000 to forecast Vaccine Misinformation narratives

CDC Funding Opportunity

On 20 October 2022, the CDC published a grant opportunity to develop a public health tool to predict the virality of vaccine misinformation narratives. The application closed a few days ago.

The purpose of the $1,000,000 grant is “to conduct research to develop and pilot a predictive model and tool to aid…in identifying emerging vaccine misinformation about recommended vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, that is likely to spread and have a high potential for impacting vaccine confidence”. It will enable public health agencies to identify misinformation before it spreads or impacts people’s health decisions.

According to the proposal, evidence for the negative impact of misinformation continues to grow. Therefore, this proposal has the potential to impact the Healthy People 2030 scheme by ensuring people get vaccinated. Healthy People 2030 sounds and looks suspiciously like something from Agenda 2030 but equally this might just be someone jumping on the bandwagon. However, one of the developmental objectives is to “increase the proportion of immunization information systems that track adult immunizations across their lifespan” which sounds a lot like vaccine passports. Maybe not but unfortunately these things need keeping an eye on these days.

The CDC estimates that “COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation caused $50-$300 million per day in additional medical costs, monetized lives lost and morbidity, and economic costs”. Therefore, they want this new tool to increase vaccination rates and disseminate accurate scientific messages.

There are 3 phases to successfully complete the proposal:

• Phase 1 - Develop a predictive model that identifies misinformation. To do this they will look at old data to find topics (such as vaccine safety and fertility), the types of people sharing this information and the relationship to societal concerns (e.g. personal liberty);

• Phase 2 - Develop a tool that can be used to prioritise the response to misinformation.

• Phase 3 - Pilot and evaluate the tool (that can be used at federal, state, local, tribal and territorial public health agency levels)

Now, I’m all for getting rid of misinformation. In an ideal world I just want to be reading facts, more facts with a few more facts sprinkled on top. However, this isn’t an ideal world and unfortunately, over the last few years, much of the misinformation has come from the CDC itself.

So a ‘Minority Report’ style system that will identify vaccine misinformation pre-crime and eliminate it before it can get out will only add to public distrust.

A Soviet-style public health propaganda set-up is not going to increase vaccine take-up. The only way to do that is to provide transparent data and allow hypotheses to formulate. These can quite easily be shut-down with accurate and open data.

What does increase vaccine hesitancy, is not having a truly independent body to analyse pharmaceutical data and then trying to bury that data for 75 years. Misinforming the public that they are going to die without a vaccine was the most harmful thing they could have done to trust in public health. Along with the suppression of adverse event signals, harms and deaths. However rare they may or may not be, by hiding just one of these causes the public to question what else is being hidden.

So I would like to claim the $1,000,000 to reduce vaccine misinformation with the following steps:

• Firstly produce a product that actually does what it is supposed to do;

• Conduct proper trials that look at short, medium and long term risks;

• Create an truly independent body that not only analyses the data it’s provided with but tests the products themselves;

• Remove propaganda such as ‘95% effective’ or ‘safe and effective’;

• Don’t conduct studies on how to manipulate the population into taking vaccines;

• Don’t force anybody to take a vaccine (by use of the psychological techniques above or through vaccine passports);

• Don’t use fear to convince people they are going to die without being vaccinated;

• Don’t supress safety-signals;

• Don’t gaslight the vaccine injured or families with members killed by vaccines;

• Remove the product from the market as soon as any safety signals, injuries or deaths occur. Explain clearly and openly what has been found and why the product has been removed;

• Don’t label anybody concerned about big pharma corruption or vaccine safety a conspiracy theorist or worse.

There you go. You don’t need any fancy and expensive systems to get people vaccinated. Just follow the steps above. But unfortunately, if your product isn’t up to scratch, you won’t make any money. You can send my $1,000,000 cheque in the post. Thanks.

Did I miss any points? And is it too late anyway? Has the amount of public health misinformation eroded away all trust, never to be regained again?