Last week, just ahead of back-to-school season, New York State health officials issued emergency regulations limiting medical exemptions from vaccination requirements for kids attending schools or day care centers.
What do celebrities think about this development? Hopefully, the public won’t find out — because it doesn’t matter. But unfortunately, when it comes to opinions about vaccination, we in the media typically make two big mistakes. We treat celebrities’ opposition to or fears about vaccines as news. And in the rare cases in which their beliefs do deserve coverage because they could potentially affect public health, we too often amplify unfounded or misleading talking points without sufficiently correcting the misinformation.
We have to do better. There’s been an alarming resurgence of measles cases — in 2019 this country has experienced the highest number of measles diagnoses in a single year since 1992, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise across the world, thanks to the growing trend of “vaccine hesitancy,” which the World Health Organization listed as one of the top 10 threats to global health in 2019.
In June, Jezebel reported that the actor Jessica Biel was lobbying California lawmakers alongside the vaccine opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They were trying to persuade legislators to vote against a bill that aims to reduce the number of people choosing not to vaccinate their kids for reasons that aren’t medically necessary.
This was more than just an actor sharing her opinion. Ms. Biel was using her platform to try to influence vaccine-related legislation. That made her views — like those of the Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, who has made numerous unfounded claims about vaccines — a matter of public health, and Jezebel was right to give her effort attention.
But some of the subsequent media coverage was more problematic. Rolling Stone ran “A Guide to 17 Anti-Vaccination Celebs” and Yahoo went with “Jessica Biel isn’t the only A-lister with opinions on vaccinations: Celebrity parents who don’t vaccinate their children.”
Some similar examples from the past few years: “Kristin Cavallari Is an Anti-Vaxxer Because She Has ‘Read Too Many Books,’” Time wrote in 2014 about Ms. Cavallari, a reality television star (a particularly bad framing because it implies that she is somehow more educated on this topic than most). “Pregnant Kat von D stirs controversy after saying she’ll raise a ‘vegan child, without vaccination,’” USA Today reported last year about Ms. von D, a makeup artist. Much of this coverage prominently parroted dangerous views and did more harm than good.
It’s not newsworthy on its face when a celebrity believes or says something incorrect about health. Context matters. As an editor, keeping in mind that studies have shown that celebrities can influence peoples’ beliefs about health, including vaccines, I encourage reporters and writers to avoid asking celebrities their opinions about vaccines if they are not already known. At Self, our policy when interviewing anyone — whether it’s a doctor with multiple degrees, or a celebrity — is to fact-check everything she says (about vaccines or anything else). And if she says something factually incorrect, we often choose not to include it, even in the context of debunking the misinformation. If we do decide to cover misinformation, it’s after a lot of internal discussion about whether it’s worth the risk.
You can argue that whenever celebrities say anything about vaccines in a public forum — especially on their social media accounts, where they often speak to millions of people — it becomes news because they’re influencing public opinion. When media organizations reach that conclusion and feel they must cover a celebrity comment about vaccines, they should work to minimize damage through more thoughtful coverage.
This is tricky because of the evidence that even myth-busting vaccine misinformation runs the risk of making readers more likely to believe the misinformation and also less inclined to vaccinate. That may be because people are more likely to believe statements that they’ve heard repeatedly — so the more exposure they have to misinformation, the more likely they are to believe it to be true, even if they have been explicitly told that it’s false.
One place to start: Treat the topic with the seriousness it deserves. Media organizations should devote seasoned health reporters to the case, rather than covering it as celebrity gossip. And then from there, instead of focusing entirely on the news of a celebrity saying something unfounded (and repeating that unfounded claim in the headline or news crawl), a more informative, less harmful approach would be to cover that celebrity’s perspective as one data point in a broader article, perhaps about the trend of vaccine hesitancy or what’s behind the law that this celebrity is opposing. Think of it as misinformation harm reduction.
Even the views of people who are “vaccine hesitant” — not completely anti-vaccine but skeptical about whether vaccines are safe enough or worth it — are frequently rooted in unsupported anti-vaccine talking points. The media, in misunderstanding this dynamic, often gives an uncritical platform to those ideas, potentially fueling greater vaccine hesitancy among the public in the process.
For example, after she received criticism for her lobbying efforts, Ms. Biel clarified her stance on Instagram, writing, “I am not against vaccinations.” Her reason for opposing the bill: “My dearest friends have a child with a medical condition that warrants an exemption from vaccinations, and should this bill pass, it would greatly affect their family’s ability to care for their child in this state.”
“Entertainment Tonight” ran a segment covering Ms. Biel’s response to the backlash. And why not? Her argument sounds reasonable enough: In a limited set of cases, there are legitimate medical reasons not to vaccinate.
But the problem here is that the bill is significantly more complicated than Ms. Biel’s framing of it, and deserved a deeper dive than “Entertainment Tonight” gave it. The back story is that public health experts and lawmakers are worried that doctors are giving kids medical exemptions when they aren’t warranted, which threatens (and even eliminates) herd immunity in some communities.
The goal of the California bill is to cut back on these unnecessary medical exemptions by standardizing the exemption request process rather than leaving the call up to individual doctors. People with legitimate medical reasons to avoid vaccinating would still be allowed to opt out.
See? Complicated. Probably far too complicated to cover all that ground in a minute-long entertainment news segment. The media has a duty to get this right, and not cause further confusion or skepticism. It is a matter of public health.
Carolyn Kylstra is editor in chief of Self Magazine.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article
Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Who Cares What Celebrities Think About Vaccines?
Opinion | Who Cares What Celebrities Think About Vaccines?
Last week, just ahead of back-to-school season, New York State health officials issued emergency regulations limiting medical exemptions from vaccination requirements for kids attending schools or day care centers.
What do celebrities think about this development? Hopefully, the public won’t find out — because it doesn’t matter. But unfortunately, when it comes to opinions about vaccination, we in the media typically make two big mistakes. We treat celebrities’ opposition to or fears about vaccines as news. And in the rare cases in which their beliefs do deserve coverage because they could potentially affect public health, we too often amplify unfounded or misleading talking points without sufficiently correcting the misinformation.
We have to do better. There’s been an alarming resurgence of measles cases — in 2019 this country has experienced the highest number of measles diagnoses in a single year since 1992, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise across the world, thanks to the growing trend of “vaccine hesitancy,” which the World Health Organization listed as one of the top 10 threats to global health in 2019.
In June, Jezebel reported that the actor Jessica Biel was lobbying California lawmakers alongside the vaccine opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They were trying to persuade legislators to vote against a bill that aims to reduce the number of people choosing not to vaccinate their kids for reasons that aren’t medically necessary.
This was more than just an actor sharing her opinion. Ms. Biel was using her platform to try to influence vaccine-related legislation. That made her views — like those of the Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, who has made numerous unfounded claims about vaccines — a matter of public health, and Jezebel was right to give her effort attention.
But some of the subsequent media coverage was more problematic. Rolling Stone ran “A Guide to 17 Anti-Vaccination Celebs” and Yahoo went with “Jessica Biel isn’t the only A-lister with opinions on vaccinations: Celebrity parents who don’t vaccinate their children.”
Some similar examples from the past few years: “Kristin Cavallari Is an Anti-Vaxxer Because She Has ‘Read Too Many Books,’” Time wrote in 2014 about Ms. Cavallari, a reality television star (a particularly bad framing because it implies that she is somehow more educated on this topic than most). “Pregnant Kat von D stirs controversy after saying she’ll raise a ‘vegan child, without vaccination,’” USA Today reported last year about Ms. von D, a makeup artist. Much of this coverage prominently parroted dangerous views and did more harm than good.
It’s not newsworthy on its face when a celebrity believes or says something incorrect about health. Context matters. As an editor, keeping in mind that studies have shown that celebrities can influence peoples’ beliefs about health, including vaccines, I encourage reporters and writers to avoid asking celebrities their opinions about vaccines if they are not already known. At Self, our policy when interviewing anyone — whether it’s a doctor with multiple degrees, or a celebrity — is to fact-check everything she says (about vaccines or anything else). And if she says something factually incorrect, we often choose not to include it, even in the context of debunking the misinformation. If we do decide to cover misinformation, it’s after a lot of internal discussion about whether it’s worth the risk.
You can argue that whenever celebrities say anything about vaccines in a public forum — especially on their social media accounts, where they often speak to millions of people — it becomes news because they’re influencing public opinion. When media organizations reach that conclusion and feel they must cover a celebrity comment about vaccines, they should work to minimize damage through more thoughtful coverage.
This is tricky because of the evidence that even myth-busting vaccine misinformation runs the risk of making readers more likely to believe the misinformation and also less inclined to vaccinate. That may be because people are more likely to believe statements that they’ve heard repeatedly — so the more exposure they have to misinformation, the more likely they are to believe it to be true, even if they have been explicitly told that it’s false.
One place to start: Treat the topic with the seriousness it deserves. Media organizations should devote seasoned health reporters to the case, rather than covering it as celebrity gossip. And then from there, instead of focusing entirely on the news of a celebrity saying something unfounded (and repeating that unfounded claim in the headline or news crawl), a more informative, less harmful approach would be to cover that celebrity’s perspective as one data point in a broader article, perhaps about the trend of vaccine hesitancy or what’s behind the law that this celebrity is opposing. Think of it as misinformation harm reduction.
Even the views of people who are “vaccine hesitant” — not completely anti-vaccine but skeptical about whether vaccines are safe enough or worth it — are frequently rooted in unsupported anti-vaccine talking points. The media, in misunderstanding this dynamic, often gives an uncritical platform to those ideas, potentially fueling greater vaccine hesitancy among the public in the process.
For example, after she received criticism for her lobbying efforts, Ms. Biel clarified her stance on Instagram, writing, “I am not against vaccinations.” Her reason for opposing the bill: “My dearest friends have a child with a medical condition that warrants an exemption from vaccinations, and should this bill pass, it would greatly affect their family’s ability to care for their child in this state.”
“Entertainment Tonight” ran a segment covering Ms. Biel’s response to the backlash. And why not? Her argument sounds reasonable enough: In a limited set of cases, there are legitimate medical reasons not to vaccinate.
But the problem here is that the bill is significantly more complicated than Ms. Biel’s framing of it, and deserved a deeper dive than “Entertainment Tonight” gave it. The back story is that public health experts and lawmakers are worried that doctors are giving kids medical exemptions when they aren’t warranted, which threatens (and even eliminates) herd immunity in some communities.
The goal of the California bill is to cut back on these unnecessary medical exemptions by standardizing the exemption request process rather than leaving the call up to individual doctors. People with legitimate medical reasons to avoid vaccinating would still be allowed to opt out.
See? Complicated. Probably far too complicated to cover all that ground in a minute-long entertainment news segment. The media has a duty to get this right, and not cause further confusion or skepticism. It is a matter of public health.
Carolyn Kylstra is editor in chief of Self Magazine.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Source: Read Full Article