Politics and vaccine misinformation: A horrifyingly bad mix
During the pandemic, numerous studies showed that millions of Canadians believed misinformation about COVID vaccines, including the idea that the vaccines killed many people and that this has been covered up by the government. A 2021 study by Angus Reid found that 55 per cent of the unvaccinated believed “COVID-19 is a conspiracy that is all about government control.” In other words, a large portion of the country believed or was open to conspiracy theories that likely increased vaccine hesitancy and, as a result, led to more deaths and hospitalizations.
Fast forward to the summer of 2024 and it has become clear that those beliefs haven’t dissipated. On the contrary, they have increased and spread. We have Alberta Premier Danial Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) hosting a public anti-vaccine event and a UCP MLA pushing to have the “COVID vaccines banned completely in Alberta.” Misinformation about COVID vaccines, and vaccines more generally, has become so entrenched and normalized that it now regularly forms part of political platforms.
Given that vaccines, including COVID vaccines, are widely considered one of the greatest achievements of biomedicine – it has been estimated that over the past 50 years vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives – this is a deeply worrying trend. We need to recognize that the merger of politics and vaccine misinformation is doing grave harm.
Let’s start by appreciating what the science actually says.
Consider just some of the recent research on the benefits of mRNA COVID vaccines. A large 2024 study involving more than 45 million individuals found that the risk of heart attack and stroke drops after COVID vaccination. Another large 2024 study that, again, included millions of participants, concluded that “COVID-19 vaccines consistently prevent long COVID symptoms in adults.” Other recent studies have found that COVID vaccination “protects against adverse maternal-fetal outcomes,” significantly reduces “incidence and hospitalizations among children,” and can help protect children with asthma. Studies have also shown a dramatic economic benefit from the COVID vaccines, including an association with “a significant increase in economic activity.” A 2023 study from Canada, for example, estimates that vaccination led to almost $300 billion “in monetary benefit compared to a situation without vaccination.”
All of these findings are part of – and consistent with – a large and growing body of evidence on the efficacy and safety of the COVID vaccines, including the key outcomes of saving millions and millions of lives and reducing hospitalizations and human suffering.
It is important to emphasize this research directly counters the most common misinformation and conspiracy theories pushed by the anti-vaccine community. There is no credible evidence that the vaccines: are causing individuals to “die suddenly”; are a major cause of excess deaths; are associated with widespread and fatal heart problems in the young; increase cancer risks or cause “turbo cancer”; or have an adverse impact on pregnancies or fertility.
So, given the strong, broad and international scientific consensus on the value of COVID vaccines, how did we get here? Obviously, there are many factors at play, but, alas, the embrace of vaccine misinformation is increasingly about ideology.
Political identity has become one of the most significant – perhaps the most significant – variable predicting vaccine hesitancy, the embrace of vaccine misinformation, distrust of relevant scientific institutions, perceptions of risk surrounding vaccines, and belief in the efficacy of disproven COVID therapies (e.g., ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine). Indeed, numerous studies have shown a strong and growing association between vaccination hesitancy and ideology. In the U.S., political partisanship matters more than race, age, insurance coverage or education in predicting vaccine uptake. Studies have consistently shown that those who identify as Republican are much more likely to not get vaccinated and to hold a dim view of COVID vaccines. A 2024 study found that even the reporting of vaccine adverse events is influenced by political identity, showing that in Republican states, “vaccine recipients or their clinicians” are more likely “to report COVID-19 vaccine AEs” than in Democratic states.
A similar trend can be found around the world, including in Canada. For example, a survey by EKOS Research during the last Alberta provincial election uncovered a remarkably polarized view of COVID vaccines. Of those Albertans who never got a COVID vaccine, 91.1 per cent supported the United Conservative Party and only 5.3 per cent supported the NDP. In other words, in Alberta, if you are unvaccinated, your political identity is very likely to be conservative. A national survey by Angus Reid found that among those who didn’t get the COVID vaccine, 81 per cent voted for either the Conservative Party (32 per cent), the People’s Party (36 per cent) or didn’t vote (13 per cent) in the last federal election. Only 6 per cent voted for the Liberals or NDP.
This merger of politics and vaccine hesitancy can be deadly.
And this merger of politics and vaccine hesitancy can be deadly. Research in the U.S. has consistently uncovered a strong link between political identity – even when measured as simply as with voting record – and COVID deaths. A 2022 study “found a positive dose-response relationship between county-level Republican vote share and county-level COVID-19 mortality.” Another study, looking at Florida and Ohio, uncovered that, during COVID, “the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43 per cent higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters.” The researchers attributed this finding to “differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters.” A 2024 study “compared excess death rates for states with different partisan orientations” and concluded that “excess death rates were higher in states with Republican governors and greater Republican representation in state legislatures.”
The harms of increasingly politicized vaccine discourse are not isolated to COVID. The hesitancy created by the spread of misinformation during the pandemic has spilled over to adversely impact the perceptions of other beneficial vaccines. A 2024 study found, in the words of the researchers, that “conservatives in the United States spread their negative attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines to unrelated vaccines,” including flu, HPV, MMR and chickenpox. Studies show that politicizing public discourse about vaccines can also heighten equity issues and make it more difficult to counter harmful misinformation.
Why has political identity become such a dominant issue in the realm of public health? While more research is needed (something our team is working on), there are likely many complex and interrelated factors at play, including, inter alia, state actors (such as Russia and China) spreading misinformation to sow distrust; the understandable desire to belong to and support a community that a person feels connected to and that speaks to their values; differences in cognitive thinking styles (numerous studies have found that conservatives may, in this cultural moment, be somewhat more susceptible to misinformation); being fed a diet of anti-vaccine messaging by conservative media (e.g., watching Fox News is “associated with increased negative public vaccine sentiment” and “increased vaccine refusal”); and the powerful, polarizing, misinformation-spreading and echo-chamber creating role of social media platforms (e.g., being part of a more right-wing online community is “associated with vaccine hesitancy in the U.S.”).
Another factor is, of course, political opportunism. As anti-vaccine movements become more mainstream in conservative politics, politicians seem more likely to use the topic as a way to get votes and play to their base. This, in turn, makes being anti-vaccine an ideological flag for those who identify with this community.
Yes, there are adverse events associated with the vaccines, as there are with almost all health-care interventions. And more data would always be helpful. Thankfully, robust research and ongoing safety surveillance has shown that serious adverse events are extremely rare and that the safety profile of COVID vaccines is impressive. Indeed, as noted by the European Medicine Agency, COVID vaccines were part of the largest vaccination program in history and, as a result, “regulators have an unprecedented amount of data to confirm the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.”
Yes, we should always strive to learn and improve science communication strategies (talking about scientific uncertainty can be extremely challenging) and public health policies like vaccine mandates are – even if effective at increasing vaccine uptake and reducing COVID cases – ethically, legally and politically complex strategies that warrant a careful and transparent consideration of risks and benefits.
And yes, it is crucial to recognize that misinformation and spin happens across the ideological spectrum. No one is immune from its pull.
But for a host of reasons, at this moment in history, antivaccine rhetoric and antivaccine beliefs reside most often (but, of course, not entirely) on the political right. Given what is at stake – saving lives, reducing human suffering, lessoning the strain on our health-care system and preparing for the next pandemic – it is essential to confront this reality and devise evidence-informed strategies to counter this trend in a constructive manner.
Timothy Caulfield is an author and Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, University of Alberta.
This article was originally published in HealthyDebate