The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that they are a victim. To them, the walls of their prison are invisible, and they believes themselves to be free. (Sic)Aldous Huxley
(10 minute read) The ‘Science’ of Manipulation: Researchers Craft Messages of Guilt, Shame to Foster Vaccine Compliance
Acknowledgment to Children’s Health Defence 02/04/22 ) Directly copied.
There’s an entire field of research dedicated to developing messaging designed to persuade “vaccinehesitant”
individuals to get the COVID-19 vaccine — and none of it has anything to do with facts.
By Ann Tomoko Rosen
There’s an entire field of research dedicated to developing messaging designed to persuade “vaccine-hesitant”
individuals to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
None of the messaging examined by researchers involves conveying factual evidence that supports the claims —
widely disseminated by Big Pharma, Big Media and public health agencies — that the vaccines are “safe” and
“effective.”
Researchers last month published the results of a clinical trial involving two survey experiments on how to
manufacture consent for COVID vaccines.
The Yale-sponsored study, “Persuasive messaging to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake intentions,” examined how
different persuasive messages affected 1) intentions to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, 2) willingness to persuade
friends and relatives to get the vaccine, 3) fear of those who have not been vaccinated, and 4) social judgment of
people who choose not to vaccinate.
According to the study’s authors:
“Given the considerable amount of skepticism about the safety and efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine, it has
become increasingly important to understand how public health communication can play a role in increasing
COVID-19 vaccine uptake.”
The paper did not address the underlying reasons someone might have concerns about the safety or efficacy of
COVID vaccines but focused instead exclusively on how to persuade them to get the vaccine.
From the paper:
“We conducted two pre-registered experiments to study how different persuasive messages affect intentions
to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, willingness to persuade friends and relatives to receive one, and negative
judgments of people who choose not to vaccinate.
“In the first experiment, we tested the efficacy of a large number of messages against an untreated control
condition … In Experiment 2, we retested the most effective messages from Experiment 1 on a nationally
representative sample of American adults.”
The messages tested by the researchers have been woven into mainstream media narratives and public health
campaigns throughout the world. But the study completion date for part 1 was July 8, 2020, which means all of
these messages were created prior to the release of any science to support them.
The baseline information control message states:
“To end the COVID-19 outbreak, it is important for people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 whenever a
vaccine becomes available. Getting the COVID-19 vaccine means you are much less likely to get COVID-19 or
spread it to others. Vaccines are safe and widely used to prevent diseases and vaccines are estimated to save
millions of lives every year.”
In order to establish which messaging strategies elicited an inclination to get vaccinated, 10 additional messages
were added to bring context to the baseline message.
These messages incorporated themes of self-interest, community interest, guilt, embarrassment, anger, bravery,
trust in science, personal freedom, economic freedom and community economic benefit.
“We find that persuasive messaging that invokes prosocial vaccination and social image concerns is effective at
increasing intended uptake and also the willingness to persuade others and judgments of non-vaccinators,” the
researchers wrote.
To study the impacts of guilt, embarrassment and anger, researchers prompted people to think about how they
would feel if they did not get vaccinated and then spread the virus to others.
“Emotions are thought to play a role in cooperation, either by motivating an individual to take an action because of
a feeling that they experience or restraining them from taking an action because of the emotional response it
would provoke in others.”
The “not brave” and “trust in sciences” messages were designed to evoke concerns about reputation and social
image. The “not brave” message “reframed the idea that being unafraid of the virus is not a brave action, but
instead selfish, and that the way to demonstrate bravery is by getting vaccinated because it shows strength and
concern for others.”
The “trust in science” message suggested, “those who do not get vaccinated do not understand science and signal
this ignorance to others.”
Personal freedom, economic freedom and community economic benefit messages drew on concerns linked to
COVID restrictions.
Overall, it was a message that appealed to community interest, reciprocity and a sense of embarrassment that
proved most persuasive, resulting in a 30% increase in intention to vaccinate, a 24% increase in willingness to
advise a friend to get vaccinated and a 38% increase in negative opinions of people who decline the vaccines
relative to the placebo message.
Community interest messages that incorporate embarrassment were determined to be most effective in getting
people to encourage others to get the vaccine, while “not brave” messaging showed the most promise in creating
negative judgments of non-vaccinators.
The Yale study findings are consistent with another recent paper, “Vaccination as a Social Contract,” which
demonstrated people view vaccination as a social contract and are less willing to cooperate with those who refuse
vaccination.
The study stated:
“The experiments consistently showed that especially compliant (i.e., vaccinated) individuals showed less
generosity toward nonvaccinated individuals … It is concluded that vaccination is a social contract in which
cooperation is the morally right choice.
“Individuals act upon the social contract, and more so the stronger they perceive it as a moral obligation.
Emphasizing the social contract could be a promising intervention to increase vaccine uptake, prevent free
riding, and, eventually, support the elimination of infectious diseases.”
Forget the facts, appeal to ‘values’
Saad Omer, one of the authors of the Yale study, has an extensive interest in public health messaging.
His efforts to combat vaccine hesitancy earned him a spot on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Strategic
Advisory Group of Experts working Group on COVID-19 Vaccines, the Sabine Vaccine Institute’s Board of Trustees
and the WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety.
In 2020, Omer initiated a “Building Vaccine Confidence Through Tailored Messaging Campaigns” project involving
randomized trials in five countries using social media messaging to increase COVID and childhood vaccine
coverage.
In his keynote address at the first WHO Global Infodemiology Conference in June 2020, Omer referenced “moral
foundation theory” and suggested appealing to values could change decision-making behaviors.
Omer provided details about a messaging study for the HPV vaccine and discussed how similar strategies could be
applied to create compliance for COVID measures:
“We wanted to test out, can we have a purity-based message? So we showed them pictures of genital warts and
described a vignette, a narrative, a story, talking about how someone got genital warts and how disgusting they
were and how pure vaccines are that sort of restore the sanctity of the body.
“So we just analyzed these data. This was a randomized control trial with apriori outcomes. We found
approximately 20 percentage point effect on people’s likelihood of getting an HPV vaccine in the next 6 months …
“We are trying out liberty-based messages or liberty-mediated messaging around this behavior related to COVID-19
outbreak. That wearing a mask or taking precautions eventually make you free, regain your autonomy. Because if
the disease rates are low, your activities can resume.”
The ‘science’ of infodemiology, infoveillance and infodemic
Omer is one of many prominent voices in what is known as the field of “infodemiology,” a term coined in 2002 by
Dr. Gunter Eysenbach.
As the first infodemiologist and founder of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, Eysenbach defines
infodemiology as ”the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically
the Internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy.”
Eysenbach also coined the terms “infoveillance,” defined as “a type of syndromic surveillance that specifically
utilizes information found online,” and “infodemic,” which refers to “an overabundance of information” that
generally includes deliberate attempts to disseminate wrong information to undermine the public health response
and advance alternative agendas of groups or individuals.”
Using just three words, Eysenbach created a scientific niche, identified a problem and proposed at least part of a
so-called solution.
The WHO readily embraced this language during the pandemic. An editorial in the August 2020 issue of The Lancet
began with a quote from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: “We’re not just fighting a
pandemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.”
The WHO hosted several infodemiology conferences throughout the pandemic. Asserting that “misinformation
costs lives,” the WHO, the United Nations and other groups created the perfect justification for social media
surveillance and the suppression of dissent.
In 2020, the WHO created a resolution asking member states to take measures to leverage digital technologies to
counter “misinformation” and “disinformation” and worked with more than 50 digital companies and social media
platforms, including TikTok and even Tinder, to support these efforts.
The efforts to eliminate “misinformation” resulted in unprecedented censorship of virtually anything that steps
outside of state-sanctioned consensus and the creation of a captive audience primed to accept a singular narrative.
A National Defense Authorization Act amendment in 2012 that legalized the use of propaganda on the American
public makes it easier for governments to create self-serving narratives.
And thanks to a multi-billion dollar budget from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), we are under the influence of the best messages money can buy
— whether or not those messages are true.
This is likely why the CDC, public health departments and mainstream media can make broad assertions like this:
“COVID-19 vaccines were developed quickly while maintaining the highest safety standard possible,” and this:
“Hydroxychloroquine shouldn’t be used to treat COVID-19,” and claim they are “fact.”
Articles and posts that challenge those assertions are regularly removed if they’re even permitted to be published
in the first place.
Public health compliance: A cottage industry
Yale is not the only university researching the science of compliance. Academic institutions and government
agencies throughout the world are immersed in this emerging behavioral science.
In February 2021, the University of Pennsylvania newsletter, Penn Today, published, “When the Message Matters,
Use Science to Craft It,” covering behavioral scientist Jessica Fishman’s Message Effects Lab (MEL) initiative and
research related to “what sways decision-making,” particularly with regard to COVID vaccination and testing.
MEL currently has partnerships and ongoing projects with the World Bank, the National Institutes of Health, the
CDC, Penn Medicine, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Independence Blue Cross/Blue Shield and the
Government of Canada to address health-related behaviors.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a branch of HHS, also sponsored research to explore influences
on COVID vaccine decision-making. The study, “Attitudes Toward a Potential SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine: A Survey of U.S.
Adults,” concluded:
“We found that a substantial proportion (42.2%) of participants in a national survey conducted during the
coronavirus pandemic would be hesitant to accept vaccination against COVID-19. Black race was one of the
strongest independent predictors of not accepting vaccination; this is especially alarming, given the outsized
impact of COVID-19 among African-Americans.
“Our findings suggest that many of the individuals who responded ‘not sure’ may accept vaccination if given
credible information that the vaccine is safe and effective. As vaccine development proceeds at an
unprecedented pace, parallel efforts to proactively develop messages to foster vaccine acceptance are
needed to achieve control of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Behavioral scientist Dr. Rupali Limaye took the messaging a step further. She teaches a free online training course,
offered by Johns Hopkins University, that “prepares parents of school-age children, PTAs, community members and
school staff to be Vaccine Ambassadors and promote vaccine acceptance in their communities.”
Limaye will be a panelist for an interactive webinar “Making COVID-19 vaccines APPEALing: Pilot message testing in
India,” later this month.
Changing messages, same goals
While government agencies and the scientific community cling to unsupported beliefs about vaccine safety and
efficacy, they appear to recognize the importance of constantly revisiting their understanding of the impacts of
messaging.
UPenn’s updated research found intentions around vaccination have changed. The university’s Annenberg School
for Communication reported:
“The researchers found that trust in scientific institutions and health authorities was central to individuals’
intentions to be vaccinated, especially in the early part of the pandemic. However, as the pandemic
continued, other factors related to trust emerged …
“The evidence, the researchers wrote, ‘documents the need for the public health community to redouble its
efforts to preemptively and persistently communicate not only about how vaccines in general work but also
about their benefits, safety, and effectiveness.’”
Research from Civics Analytics, a technology company that creates data-driven audience campaigns, seconds the
notion that effective messaging must evolve.
With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the company explored COVID concerns among different
demographics and determined that a “one-size-fits-all” message would not work. The company said:
“In the spring of 2021, before the Delta variant emerged in the U.S. and when vaccine mandates had not yet
been implemented, we found that messages highlighting experiences that are off-limits to unvaccinated
individuals (such as concerts or international travel) or emphasizing personal choice were most persuasive…
“As you’ll see in this research, the most persuasive messages have changed.”
According to Civics Analytics, FOMO (fear of missing out) and “personal decision” messages were the most
impactful. But more current data indicates the “protecting children” message has become more effective at
persuading people to get vaccinated.
From the study:
“For general messaging targeting all unvaccinated people, focus on protecting children from COVID-19 and on
the financial ramifications of contracting the virus.”
The company found “vaccine safety,” “scary COVID statistics” and “personal story” messages were inclined to
backfire and could decrease the likelihood of vaccinating.
Perhaps some good scientists will advance the learning curve and study what happens when the public discovers
that “proven messages” lack supporting scientific data.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of
Children’s Health Defense.
Ann Tomoko Rosen
Ann Tomoko Rosen is co-founder of The Center for Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine in Westfield,
NJ.