COVID-19 Infodemic

In this talk, Ana de las Heras (Spanish Foundation of Rheumatology) addresses the relation of rumours, trust and COVID-19 vaccines. As she exemplifies through the widespread opposition to the Nigerian polio immunization campaign in 2003, the anti-vax movement has existed for a long time precisely because vaccines cannot escape the context of their development, which encompasses the political and religious spheres. In this line, she recommends both Adam Kucharski’s The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread—and Why they Stop (2020) for its warning against the contagiousness of historical oblivion and Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (2017), which serves a similar purpose by reviving the twentieth-century pandemic. The goal is to encourage action in the face of misinformation.

 

A. de las Heras | COVID-19 Infodemic