By Newley Purnell
NEW DELHI--Antivaccine misinformation, some of it from social
media posts in the West, is spreading in India on WhatsApp,
undermining efforts to root out measles and rubella in a country
where tens of thousands of people are struck by the diseases each
year.
Dozens of schools in Mumbai have refused to allow health
officials to carry out vaccinations in recent months, largely
because of rumors shared on Facebook Inc.'s popular messaging app
about the supposed dangers.
Several thousand children have missed out on treatment so far,
according to officials at the United Nations Children's Fund. In
New Delhi, a campaign to vaccinate students at schools has been
halted by scared parents.
"It's rumors on WhatsApp" that are the chief culprit, said Sonia
Sarkar, a Unicef official in New Delhi. "They've traveled faster
than the vaccines."
A WhatsApp spokesman declined to comment about messages
containing antivaccine information, but noted the company has
undertaken educational campaigns in India and made technical tweaks
to the app to try to dissuade users from forwarding false news.
WhatsApp has an estimated 300 million users in India, where a boom
in internet usage in the past three years has brought hundreds of
millions of people online for the first time.
The spread of misinformation about vaccination shows the
challenge WhatsApp faces handling controversial content on the
encrypted service, as Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg
pivots globally to private messaging platforms.
More than 100,000 people die every year globally because of
measles, most of them children, according to the World Health
Organization. About a third of those deaths are in India, Unicef
says. Rubella causes tens of thousands of birth defects in India
every year.
In the U.S., measles used to be rare but has spread to 15 states
this year as people have avoided inoculation because of religious
views and misinformation about vaccine safety.
Many of the same reports that have misled Americans have been
spread in India, typically through WhatsApp, analysts and health
officials say. The materials being forwarded among parents in India
are often taken from groups in the U.S. that post antivaccine
videos on YouTube and Facebook.
"Don't use vaccinations. Save the lives of your children," says
one forwarded WhatsApp message in two Indian languages that was
provided by health officials and reviewed by The Wall Street
Journal.
The message claims vaccines are linked to autism and other
disorders. "It is a moral duty to all of us" to spread the message,
it reads. The message provides links to U.S.-based YouTube channels
with names like The Truth About Vaccines and iHealthTube.com.
Appended to the end of the message is the name and phone number
of the sender, Kaleem Yusuf Abdullah, an environmentalist in the
Indian city of Malegaon, about 170 miles from Mumbai.
"I have seen many videos on YouTube," he said in an interview.
"After watching these videos I was in doubt" about the safety of
vaccines. "I'm not convinced by doctors" who proclaim vaccines are
safe, he said.
The scientific community continues to debunk claims about
vaccines' supposed dangers. A study published last month in the
Annals of Internal Medicine found no link between the measles,
mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, confirming previous
research.
Facebook last month said it would make it harder for vaccine
skeptics to disseminate false claims, banning certain ads and
changing its algorithms to downgrade offending pages. Google's
YouTube service and image site Pinterest also are addressing the
issue.
It will be tougher to tamp down the spread of that information
in India. WhatsApp has no public postings or advertisements to
remove, and the company says it cannot view messages. WhatsApp says
it is committed to maintaining its users' privacy and has vowed not
to let even authorities monitor messages.
Questionable content has been at the center of political debate
in India this year. As national elections started Thursday,
WhatsApp has been taking steps to inhibit the flow of false
news.
The messaging service has made it harder to forward messages to
large groups of people and this month launched a project that
enables users to forward dubious messages for debunking. The Wall
Street Journal has in recent days submitted to the service 10
messages--including some containing antivaccine misinformation that
were shared by local health officials--but hasn't received
responses about the messages' veracity. The service says it tries
to provide classifications within 24 hours and cannot respond to
every submission.
India is vulnerable to potential damage from incorrect
information about vaccines. The vaccination rate among children in
the U.S. is still above 92%, a level considered adequate for
preventing widespread outbreaks. But in India, only about 88% of
1-year-olds had been vaccinated, meaning there is greater risk.
Worries about vaccines have existed for decades, but antivaccine
messages have blossomed in the internet age, and fear-inducing
material can spread quickly on social media.
In India, people who are new to the internet have, in effect,
not yet been inoculated against false reports, said Praful
Bharadwaj, who coordinates vaccination efforts for Unicef in
India's northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
"You don't have any control over WhatsApp," he said.
Write to Newley Purnell at newley.purnell@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 13, 2019 07:14 ET (11:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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