Coronavirus crisis: Anti-vaxxers and COVID-19 conspiracy theorist putting national vaccine rollout at risk

Emily describes her experience as similar to coming to terms with the death of a parent. Her mum is alive and physically well, but is a COVID conspiracy theorist who is so glued to her phone going down online rabbit holes that Emily feels they can no longer have a rational conversation. Their family is not unique. In WA there are currently very few COVID-19 restrictions and the State has not faced a lockdown in months. But this didn’t stop about 1000 people attending an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination protest in Perth about two weeks ago. In Sydney and Melbourne thousands have also attended protests. This week when Emily’s grandfather got vaccinated, her mother locked herself in her bedroom and refused to come out. “She was saying, ‘What have you done? You’ve put poison into your body and you’ve brought poison into my house’,” Emily, 36, who lives in a multi-generational household with her parents and grandparents in Sydney told The Sunday Times. “You kind of have to come to terms with the loss of a parent basically. A parent that’s still there but she’s gone. You can’t talk to her about anything.” Among those fuelling protests are conspiracy theorists with thousands of social media followers. This includes Karen Brewer, a QAnon follower who has posted death threats against Australian politicians and has been described as “disgraceful and inexplicable” by a Federal Court judge. Perth-based Instagrammer Anna Richards, who has 62,000 followers, also came under fire this week for false claims that a 17-year-old boy from Sydney had died as a result of receiving Pfizer in a mass vaccination program for students. The student was not vaccinated. He died after suffering a heart attack during a swim with his family. Instagram has since slapped a “False Information” label on Richards’ video but it is still available to view. There is also a significant cohort of people who remain vaccine hesitant. While not all of these people follow conspiracy theories they remain unconvinced of getting the vaccine right now. According to the the Melbourne Institute’s vaccine hesitancy tracker, 22.4 per cent of West Aussies are vaccine hesitant with 12.5 per cent saying they “don’t know” if they will get the vaccine and 9.9 per cent saying they are “not willing” to get the vaccine. Health experts who spoke to The Sunday Times said because there had been limits in vaccine supply, Australia has been yet to establish the full extent of vaccine hesitancy as the focus has largely been on allowing those who want the jab to access it. But they warned as the rollout further progresses, the vaccine hesitancy will become more of a problem. WA Premier Mark McGowan confirmed this week he intends to wait until WA has reached an “above 80 per cent vaccination rate” before bringing down the interstate borders. WA currently has the lowest percentage of fully vaccinated people of any State or Territory with just 32.66 per cent fully vaccinated. WHY ANTI-VAX? University of Western Australia’s Media and Communication lecturer Dr Tauel Harper has been tracking attitudes expressed towards the vaccine on social media as part of the joint Coronavax study from UWA and Telethon Kids Institute. The study regularly provides both the State and Federal Government updates on misinformation circulating online. His analysis of the most shared anti-COVID vaccination posts found that fears around “excessive Government control” were by far the most common theme in the top 25 posts from February to August 2021. This was a shift from the analysis of posts in the 12 months leading up to February 2021 where the QAnon conspiracy theory was the most common theme. Dr Harper said this could partially be attributed to the crackdown on QAnon from Facebook and other social media companies. QAnon is a disproven conspiracy that there is a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media who former US president Donald Trump had secretly been fighting against. Dr Harper said his research had also found spikes of activity in the anti-vaxxer online communities when lockdowns were announced in Sydney and fed into the “excessive Government control” sentiment. “Anti-vaxx (online activity) has blown up again recently and it’s been around the lockdowns in Sydney,” Dr Harper said. “When they introduced those lockdowns that’s when you saw this big resurgence of activity.” He theorised one of the reasons lockdown protests had been held in Perth — despite there being no current local restrictions lockdown in WA — was that many of those engaged in conspiracy theories spent large amounts of time online in communities on apps like Signal and Telegram. They shared a common belief there is excessive Government control and did not necessarily differentiate between Governments. “Often the people who fall for this kind of thing they’re getting a lot of their media from international and national Signal groups,” Dr Harper said. “They’re not necessarily that critically engaged with what’s going on around them,” Dr Harper said. “I’ve seen so many social media posts that infer or make a basic assumption that whatever is happening in America is happening here. “If the NSW Government does this, then (they think) our Government does it too, even though obviously, (NSW Premier) Berejiklian is different from McGowan and now the situations are very different as well. “They're not usually interrogating things to that level....they feel “oh, this is persecution and that's where they stop.” Interestingly, Dr Harper said anti-vaccination conspiracy posts decreased when rare cases of blood-clotting linked with AstraZeneca were publicised. He believed this was because these issues had been addressed transparently by the Federal Government. This undermined anti-vaxxer conspiracies which are often based around the idea of Government cover-up and secrecy. It was for this reason Dr Harper said he was opposed to making the vaccine mandatory as he believed it would further feed into the government-control conspiracy. “I think that the, the real problem with anti-vaxxers is with the Delta variant. Previously with COVID, we probably could have stood to have an 80 per cent or 70 per cent vaccination rate and still have herd immunity,” Dr Harper said. “Whereas with Delta, it looks like it needs to be more than 90 per cent. And the fact is, unless we can change some anti-vaxxers’ minds, we’re probably not going to. “(But) I do think itthat will naturally happen. Given time, given enough exposure to both the virus and the vaccine, the anxiety around it will lessen. “But the issue is — given that lockdowns seemed to drive anti-vax — it’s a really fine balancing act between the Governments making sure people know that vaccines are the best way out of this without necessarily overreaching and making people feel scared or persecuted or under excessive control.” CHANGING MINDS Those who had family members or friends who had been captured by anti-vaxxer conspiracies described having reasonable conversations with their loved ones as “near impossible”. Emily, the woman in Sydney who is struggling with anti-vaxxer parents, said her mother would become highly distressed in conversations to the point where she would “shake and cry”. Emily said her mum had family in WA she would like to visit again at some point, but even this wasn’t proving an incentive to get the jab. She said her mother had first become involved in QAnon conspiracies around 2017 during a period of depression. “It’s so hard to know what to do ... I think a large part of it is access to mental health care for these people,” she said. “Mum has a ball of neuroses and underlying health conditions that she won’t get addressed because she believes big pharma and doctors are not to be trusted.” Another woman, who lives in Perth and works as a cleaner, told The Sunday Times about a recent experience she had with a client where they asked her not to come back to their house after they discovered she had received the COVID-19 vaccination. They believed in the discredited “shedding” theory — that you could catch COVID-19 from someone who has had the vaccination as they would “shed” the virus. This is not possible as COVID vaccines don’t contain any live virus to shed. “He asked me not to come back so I wouldn’t contaminate him,” the woman said. “I was mostly upset by the hostility of it, because I do know a few people who have these sort of views. A lot of it seems to do with the internet, because most of these people are elderly and all they do is go on the internet (to get their information).” Dr Harper said those captured by conspiracies could be extremely tough to reason with, but it was important to stay calm in discussions and try and find common ground. “Leading by example by going out and getting vaccinated is the best thing you can do. I think when talking to these people you have to focus on what you agree upon,” he said. “Encouraging these people to spend less time on social media and engage more with the real world is a really good thing.” HESITANT OR ANTI? Other experts who spoke to The Sunday Times said it was important to differentiate between those who are vaccine hesitant and those who engage in conspiracy theories. While there is crossover between the groups, calling someone who is hesitant an “anti-vaxxer” was likely to polarise them and make them more likely to engage in conspiracies. Traditionally, Australia has had a very high vaccination rate with childhood immunisation rates above 95 per cent. This means many of those expressing hesitancy towards the COVID-19 vaccine are likely to have previously had vaccinations like the flu jab and vaccinated their children. Academics also pointed to disagreements between the State and Federal Government as unhelpful and a source of mixed messaging. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Premier Mark McGowan have been in ongoing stoush over what rate of vaccination should be needed to lift state borders. Professor Jaya Dantas is an academic at the Curtin School of Population Health and said she had been surprised by the levels of hesitancy even among her own social circle. “I’ve been very surprised at colleagues who have said, ‘Oh, I’'m going to wait and watch’,” she said. “(They’re not saying) I don’t want to take the vaccine, it’s, ‘I’m just not sure at this stage, I want to wait and watch’.” “I’ve been trying to talk to a lot of them and I have an older friend who is very much influenced by these anti-vaxxers.” She believed there needed to be clearer messaging on the rollout. “I think we need our leaders on board, we have some mixed messaging with the leaders across Australia in terms of numbers and dates and borders opening and it just causes a lot of confusion.” she said. “(Hesitant people) say, ‘Oh this is what our Premier McGowan said, this is what Gladys said, or this is what Anastasia said’. It becomes very difficult when there’s not consistency of messaging by the leaders of our country.” University of Western Australia vaccination policy expert Dr Katie Attwell has been leading the team conducting interviews with people who are hesitant as part of the Coronavax study and said common concerns were around side effects and long-term impacts. She said when speaking with hesitant people it was helpful to try and connect to their values. “If someone was to say to me that they’re worried about the vaccine, because they're worried about the long-term effects ... I would say what I’m hearing there is that you’re worried about your health, that you obviously take your health really seriously,” Dr Attwell said. “(I would say) I understand that, because that’s exactly how I feel about my body and my health. But for me, that's a really strong reason to vaccinate, because I’m really worried about the long-term effects of COVID”. Dr Attwell said because of issues in vaccine supply she believed the true extent of hesitancy was yet to be known. “The government policies at State and Federal level are pretty much approaching the low-hanging fruit. When we’ve had a constraint around supply it’s really been about meeting that demand,” she said. “The systems haven’t really made that pivot to, ‘Alright, we think we’ve got everyone that we could get (vaccinated) easily, now, how do we go and reach the people that are harder for us to get?’.” She said the Government should be working now to actively reach those who were hesitant rather than waiting until later stages of the rollout, particularly because some of the people who were hesitant were in vulnerable groups such as Aboriginal people. There also needed to be targeted outreach on hesitancy among those who were in groups now facing mandates like aged care and health care workers. COVID REALISM After being one of the unlucky few West Aussies to contract COVID-19 last year in 2020, Rebecca Weller’s message is clear: this is not an illness you want to contract. Both Ms Weller, an author and businesswoman, and her husband contracted the virus in March last year. Initially Ms Weller, who was 45 at the time, said she expected to recover quickly because of her healthy lifestyle. But the illness was so bad she ended up needing to take nine weeks off work. “I think the hardest thing for me is when I got COVID I couldn’t work for nine weeks and we were told that you’d recover after two weeks, so I was like, ‘Why isn’t this getting better?’,” she said. “And for it to take nine weeks and be so deabilitating was such a shock to me because my husband I both live very healthy lives. We don’t smoke, we don’t drink, we don’t eat sugar, gluten or dairy.” Ms Weller continued to experience symptoms of what is known as long-COVID for 17 months after getting the illness. If she was too tired, or pushed herself too hard when exercising, symptoms like the fatigue and brain fog would return. Ms Weller, who is now fully vaccinated, said she couldn’t wait to get the jab because of how bad her experience with COVID was. One of the few blessings was of getting COVID had been that many of her friends and family had also been quick to get vaccinated as they had seen her experience firsthand. “Talk to someone credible, talk to your doctor, talk to someone who’s had the virus. To date I’m yet to see anyone whose actually had it be anti-vax,” she said. “Because once you’ve had it you realise the severity of it and I think you realise it’s like something we’ve never experienced before. It’s definitely not like the flu.” Participate in the UWA coronavirus vaccine attitude study.

Coronavirus crisis: Anti-vaxxers and COVID-19 conspiracy theorist putting national vaccine rollout at risk

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