“It is possible that this relationship could be stronger in ‘rich’ countries since they have better Internet access, and [that is where] conspiracy communities live and prosper,
“In websites, both the content and the images try to feed several social fears using attention-grabbing and negative terms,” Brown said. But at the same time, users demand more information about the benefits and risks of vaccines “in order to justify the arbitrary interference of the State when it compels people to get vaccinated against their will”,
In Brazil,
the Ministry of health has found several Facebook groups that have reached more than 13,000 followers as of 2017. These are fora where parents with anti-vaccine sentiments have shared blog posts — the majority of which are from other countries and in English — about alleged reactions to vaccines such as autism.
These groups seem to be achieving success in their anti-vaccine campaigns: in 2017, only 76.7 per cent of children in Brazil received the second dose of the MMR vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella, according to the Ministry of Health.
The risk that results from people getting convinced that vaccines are ineffective is that both adults and children stop getting immunised. “You only need a small number of people that don’t get vaccinated in order to lose the ‘collective immunity’ that makes diseases reappear,”