I recently posted a story about avoiding false frames and re-framing to promote your message. In it, I made an untrue statement based on a false premise. The statement was never to use the word “mandate”. The false premise — based on my areas of prevention research — was that the word “mandate” was not a common term. In fact it is, particularly in the area of vaccine requirements. So mea culpa, have at it.
I did want to use this opportunity to re-iterate a few important points:
- Carefully examine the framing used by the right, both in the use of key words and their inferred definition.
- Don’t start any answer or writing with that framing and then try to break out of it or debunk it. Studies have shown that you lose people’s attention fairly early on. If you start with the false frame, more people will remember that than your rebuttal.
- Start with the re-framed argument and only refer to the false frame much later if you feel you need to discredit it.
- Facts only act to re-enforce the understanding of those on your side. To persuade the people on the fence, use words with emotional content to promote public health and to criticize those who undermine it — masks, vaccines, dare I say mandates = very good; COVID-19, anti-public health, anti-masks, anti-vaccines = very bad
- Re-define words, for example freedom, in the new frame — Biden did this when he said vaccinated persons wanted the freedom to go into public spaces without fear of contracting COVID. His speech actually had a lot of that. Nice job speech writers!
- Create re-framed messages often and spread them as widely as you can. On social media, this would include both your own posts and in comments/replies. Also, comments and letters to the editor to point out false framing in news reports are incredibly important.
AND MORE
In my searches on the topic of vaccine mandates and the anti-vaxxer movement, I ran across a couple of things I thought many of you might find interesting.
ORIGIN OF PARENTAL ANTI-VAXXER MOVEMENT
The discredited doctor hailed by the anti-vaccine movement
I was vaguely aware that the anti-vaxxer message that childhood vaccines cause autism was based on discredited studies, but the link above provided some major insights to me. Specifically, I learned that it all started in a highly renowned UK peer-reviewed medical journal Lancet. An article on the origin of this anti-vaxxer belief reads:
In 1998, a major medical journal based in the UK, The Lancet, published a report headed by Andrew Wakefield, who was at that time a gastroenterological surgeon and medical researcher.The report implied a causal link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and the development of autism combined with IBD in children, which Wakefield described as a new syndrome he named “autistic entercolitis”. For more than a decade, the media has widely reported on the study, leading tens of thousands of people to believe that the suggestion about the MMR vaccine must be true. As a result of this global vaccine scare, immunization rates dropped in the UK and North America. This of course has also lead to an increase in recent years of cases of measles, which the vaccine could have prevented.
It should be noted that scientific and medical journals can publish findings that are later proven to be incorrect. Part of that is the complexity of human subjects research, and many times the wrong conclusions are made in good faith on the best available evidence. I was taught to use careful language, like “suggests” or ”is consistent with” and never “proves”, and all the journals I have published in require a comprehensive Limitations section and a statement on potential conflicts of interest. When peer-review fails to do its due diligence, however, significant harm can occur.
The medical community immediately rose up to take issue with Wakefield’s study, particularly because it only involved 12 children. In addition, a UK journalist soon discovered that funding for Wakefield’s research included a lawyer working on an anti-vaccine lawsuit for parents who believed vaccinations were responsible for their children’s medical conditions. In research, like in many things, follow the money.
After the righteous uproar, a retraction was printed in Lancet and large numbers of rigorous studies (required by this myth) have since concluded that there is no link between childhood vaccines and autism. But the damage of the article and its publication in Lancet reverberates to this day.
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF VACCINE REQUIREMENTS
On the other hand, the good news is that vaccine requirements really do work. The writers at Scientific American are particularly talented at reviewing topics in ways very approachable by the lay public. I highly recommend their article on Biden’s vaccine mandates titled, “Vaccine Mandates Are Lawful, Effective and Based on Rock-Solid Science”. The money quote:
Are these mandates lawful and ethical? The short answer is emphatically yes. And there is strong behavioral science evidence that mandates will be highly effective.
Amen to that!