While the local rollout of Covid 19 vaccinations is underway and numbers are growing, a new report by Reset Australia shows that the number of Australians hesitant to be vaccinated is rising – and the report blames it on social media.

Local vaccination numbers

Healthy North Coast (HNC), the organisation responsible for the vaccination rollout in our area, has recently reported that 57,000 COVID-19 vaccinations have already been administered across the North Coast region.

HNC chief executive Julie Sturgess said numbers are going up in the region and local residents are showing strong support for the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and getting protected against the virus.  

So far, 51,663 doses of the COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine have been administered, predominantly through primary care, and more than 5,300 Pfizer doses have been provided to older people living in Residential Aged Care Facilities (RACFs) and frontline health workers. 

“We are a long way off the majority of residents being vaccinated though,” Ms Sturgess said.

“The threat of a COVID-19 outbreak remains a real possibility. Expanding the dose availability in the coming weeks will give more and more residents the opportunity to get protected, which is great.”

COVID-19 vaccinations to 11 May 2021 on the North Coast 

Facebook anti-vaxx groups

Independent group Reset Australia has also conducted research which shows Australians following public anti-vaxx Facebook groups grew nearly 300% during the pandemic.

The report says the rise correlates with Australia's rising vaccine hesitancy rates, and identified 13 public Facebook groups with users based in Australia. Researchers tracked their growth between January 2020 to March 2021.

The 13 included anti-lockdown style groups, such as 'End the Lockdown in Australia, ' Digital Warfare', and 'Australia Freedom Alliance', and larger, established anti-vaxx groups, such as 'Australians for Safe Technology'.

During the research period, subscription to these groups grew by 280%, and as of March 2021, these groups had a combined total of over 115,000 members, generating over 2.66 million interactions.

A University of Melbourne survey found between October 2020 and February this year, the percentage of Australians willing to get the COVID-19 jab fell by 8.2% from 74% to 66%. 

Conspiracy

Reset Australia spokesperson Chris Cooper said social media has “supercharged conspiracy theories and misinformation, pushing some people into echo chambers where false information is all they see”.

The research found engagement with the Facebook groups exploded during the initial national lockdown. Melbourne's lockdown restriction generate over 177,000 monthly interactions, and this engagement has remained consistently high. 

Members of the group 'Wake Up Australia' frequently shared links, photos, videos and statuses with false and misleading information about the pandemic and vaccines. 

Reset Australia found common themes included: the safety and efficacy of vaccines including the promotion of treatments using Ivermectin (201 mentions) and Hydroxychloroquine (601 mentions); threats to civil liberties and personal freedoms that lockdowns pose; mandatory vaccination programmes (1649 mentions); the political and economic motives of leading political figures such as Bill Gates (1390 mentions) and Dan Andrews (1592 mentions); and well-established and novel conspiracy theories such as the The Great Reset (927 mentions).

Mr Cooper said public groups like those Reset Australia monitored were often gateways to private groups which shared more radical and extreme content. This research only captured a small snapshot of the true extent of misinformation on Facebook. 

"Public Facebook groups are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to track and tracing anti-vaxx and COVID-19 misinformation.  

"The real danger of rampant vaccine hesitancy and scientific scepticism is tucked away in algorithm-created bubbles of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, where ideas fester and spread, unseen and unchecked by mainstream conversation.

"But now social media can instantly find you thousands of like-minded people who are eager to reinforce and exacerbate your misguided views."

Reset Australia has developed a policy, the Data Access Mandate for a Better COVID-19 Response in Australia, that would allow public health officials, researchers and journalists access to anonymised data about what COVID-19 related content is being shared in these kinds of private groups.

This policy would force social media companies to generate a ‘Live List’ of the most popular COVID-19 related URLs shared on their platforms, including in private and public groups, and keep it updated in real time. Such a Live List would help Australian public health authorities identify anti-vaccination narratives to inform community engagement responses.

"A Live List would begin to quantify the extent of misinformation and help us target appropriate misinformation to disrupt the conspiratorial feedback loop."

The report can be found here.