I learned about the anti-vaccine movement when I was younger. Before I went to medical school, I was told by a friend that vaccines cause autism. I was skeptical of the vaccine claim. I didn't think about vaccines a lot during medical school and residency. They were not usually brought up in the day-to-day care of patients with neurological or psychiatric illnesses.
I became enamored with the anti-vaccine movement when I trained with a doctor who became one of the most outspoken anti-vaccine doctors. I followed the anti-vaccine movement. My main interest was the cognitive flaws and logical fallacies that led smart people to reject medicine. I didn't feel that vaccine-preventable diseases were a threat to my children, but I was worried about the anti-vaccine movement. I said before the outbreak that I would do it again.
The biggest danger to my kids isn’t the measles, but the thought process that leads people to reject the vaccine in the first place.
The anti-vaccine movement was interesting to observe over the next decade. When I first saw it, it was possible for anti-vaccine people to make claims about the vaccine's effects on children. That was cool at one time. The price of entry into Anti-Vaxx World was what the bogus claim was about. Since there was nothing to be gained by blaming vaccines for all sorts of illnesses, such as SIDS, anti-vaccine experts were forced to blame them. RFK Jr. compared vaccinations to rape. Doctors were attacked frequently.
She spoke glowingly of vaccine-preventable diseases. It's your baby. The doctor said their Flu.
This better way embraces periodic sickness as part of comprehensive wellness. The only way to truly protect ourselves and our infants is through natural immunity bolstered by wild-type exposure in the community. Once you have a particular flu strain, when it comes around again, you will be uniquely protected, and you will pass on this protection to your newborn. There is no replacement for this.
In the way it did in 2000, simply saying that vaccines cause autism doesn't cut it. Anti-vaccine doctors had to escalate their rhetoric in order to get more clicks and customers.
This doesn't mean that people like Dr.Brogan are insincere in their beliefs. She is a leader of the anti-vaccine movement, but she is also a follower. She won't be allowed to say certain things The efficacy of the vaccine was found in a study in 2020.
Was particularly pronounced among girls vaccinated before age 17, among whom there was a nearly 90% reduction in cervical cancer incidence during the 11-year study period .
Sharing this information with her followers would not be possible. She can't share many truths without damaging her brand. It's sad that she put herself in this situation.
Everything is new again. The vaccine situation is repeating itself. Last year I noticed an increase in the number of contrarian doctors. Doctors who had valid concerns about vaccinations for children are now anti-vaccines. A doctor who once said that no one would argue against the first dose of the vaccine is now calling for the dissolution of the academy.
The audience of doctors has grown a lot over the last year. They have been making a lot of videos on the internet. Substack is a good source of revenue. Some people have access to powerful politicians. The majority of people have large social media presences. They had to increase their rhetoric in order to get more attention. All of it is familiar.
Adherents too are trapped. There is information that they cannot share. The randomized controlled trials of the COVID vaccine have shown to be very effective in limiting severe disease in children. According to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, almost all of the hospitalized children were unvaccinated. There are a lot of these studies.
Some doctors can't share these studies. Their followers would abandon them if it was off- brand. These studies show that the vaccine works. It's sad that some doctors have put themselves in this situation. Information on vaccine-myocarditis is easy to share. For example, if these doctors told their audience that they should get their childrenvaccinated against COVID, they would ruin their carefully-curated reputation. They wouldn't be together.
A self-reinforcing feedback loop that involves telling one's audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it is called audience capture. In an article titled The Perils of Audience Capture How Influencers Become Brainwashed by Their Audiences, Gurwinder Bhogal warned of its dangers.
“Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it’s not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one… It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience.
Mr. Bhogal said that he was going to continue.
When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they’d receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.
The caricature quickly becomes the influencer’s distinct brand, and all subsequent attempts by the influencer to remain on-brand and fulfill audience expectations require them to act like the caricature. As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer.
I have observed what anti-vaxxers and contrarian doctors have done before and during the Pandemic. They have cornered themselves into positions they knew to be quackery prior to the Pandemic. They write pro-viruses articles and argue that it is natural and healthy when children get sick with Covid.
The number of their social media followers is slightly worse. The results of a study from 900 volunteers were released the next day, despite a doctor's claim that the new boosters had only been tested in 8 mice. There are some comments from his thread.
The people who correct misinformation are blocked on social media. Doctors are forced to adopt more extreme positions if they are cornered by their followers. Doctors praiseviruses in this way.
Young doctors need to be careful not to develop a brand. You could become their follower. Mr. Bhogal warned would-beinfluencers and social media celebrities.
This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one’s own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it’s worth remembering that when you become who your audience expects at the expense of who you are, the affection you receive is not intended for you but for the character you’re playing, a character you’ll eventually tire of. And so be warned: being someone often means being fake, and if you chase the approval of others, you may, in the end, lose the approval of yourself.
Having the wrong audience is worse than having no one to watch.
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