How to Help Stop Anti-Vax Propaganda from Infecting Your Small Business (And Why You Should Want To)
Anti-vaccination propaganda is causing outbreaks of childhood diseases like measles that were basically eradicated in places like North America and Europe and it’s not only bad for people’s health and the next generation who are being put at risk, it’s also bad for business.
In an opinion piece for the Financial Times, Harvard Kennedy School senior fellow Myriam Sidibe says the persistent anti-vaxxer movement goes beyond just a burgeoning public health crisis.
Anti-vaxxers are people who oppose vaccinations and try to convince parents not to get their children vaccinated by erroneously claiming vaccinations cause autism and are a conspiracy by the government and pharmaceutical companies.
Social media sites are facing backlash for allowing anti-vax nonsense to proliferate and the pharmaceutical companies that provide the vaccinations are also facing increased suspicion from people who have bought into anti-vax propaganda, causing some of those companies to start campaigns to remind people about the importance of immunization.
I know it is difficult to feel sorry for social media companies that sell your information and have been instrumental in eroding democracy around the world and pharmaceutical companies that routinely put profits above people’s health and have single-handedly created the opioid crisis, but anti-vaccination propaganda affects your business, too.
Think about this; improving people’s health was a major factor in economic development throughout human history and the advances made during the 20th century were among the most significant, including large scale immunizations that all but eradicated in the developed world what used to be common fatal diseases.
The developed world has seen the benefits of vaccines for decades and the developing world is now seeing those same gains. But, anti-vaccination propaganda is slowly putting a stop to this and rolling back the progress that has happened.
Sidibe cites the 1,000 cases in the United States of measles (a disease declared functionally eradicated in the US in 2000), which is an annual record for the 21st century, along with a 20-year peak happening in Europe, 30,000 cases in Pakistan and Madagascar being pummelled by the easily preventable disease.
While the cause of those outbreaks in developing nations can be credited to difficulty in procuring vaccines, the outbreaks in developed nations are due to vaccine hesitancy, which the World Health Organization now lists as one of the top 10 public health threats.
Sidibe says research has shown that for every $1 spent on child immunization, it creates $44 in benefit to society, which makes sense when you consider that healthy children grow up to become adult consumers. In addition to that, healthy children mean parents don’t have to take time off work to care for sick kids.
So, what can you do as a small business owner to make sure healthy children grow up to be healthy customers?
Sidibe suggests these three things:
1. Take a personal responsibility for your employees’ families.
When you hire a person, you may not be hiring an individual, you may actually betaking partial responsibility for that person’s whole family. You may be the sole source of income and health benefits for an employee’s family.
Taking a personal responsibility for your employees’ families health also pays dividends for you. As Sidibe points out, your healthcare costs could rise if staff’s children fall seriously ill with these contagious diseases. You will also lose work days if that staff has to stay home with them, which might affect productivity.
2. Provide accurate information to employees about vaccines.
Make information available to your employees to counteract any anti-vaccination scare mongering they might come across online. Of course, you can’t make them read or pay attention to it, but you can still make it accessible to them.
As their employer, you already have the trust of people, so you are in an excellent position to steer them away from the spurious claims of anti-vaxxers and toward the sound scientific reasoning of why vaccinations are important.
3. If you’re in the children’s health industry, use your platform.
If your company is in any kind of industry that relates to children, use your authoritative platform to distribute true information about vaccines and counteract anti-vaccination propaganda. That’s what the BabyCenter website did. Owned by Johnson & Johnson, the website distributes information about vaccinations on its website. When it discovered anti-vaxxers had infiltrated its chatroom and were spreading their falsehoods, the company added algorithms to root out the problem.
Other children’s industry heavy hitters are also doing their part with Unilever having a partnership with the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiatives while Procter & Gamble’s Pampers has a partnership with Unicef to provide vaccines to children in remote parts of Africa.
It behooves us all — entrepreneur or not — to try and counteract the backwards slip the anti-vaxxer movement has initiated.
