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‘Are You Vaccinated?’ - Short Documentary Film Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOdo5hBPELU

Advance Immunity Instagram Link:

https://www.instagram.com/advanceimmunity/?hl=en

This campaign is designed to bring awareness to an issue that has been on the rise for nearly 20 years in our society. The ‘Anti-vaccination movement’, or ‘vaccine-hesitant’ groups is a colossal problem that has and will affect smaller societies and ‘global health’, as stated in a recent article by the World Health Organization, vaccine-hesitancy was noted to be one of the “top ten threats to global health in 2019” (World Health Organization, 2019). Alongside this, many other credited and reliable health organisations and officials have noted that vaccine hesitancy and the ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement is extremely harmful to public health and generally is an unsafe movement to be involved in (Pandolfi et al. , 2018). These notions have led to other forms of keeping ‘anti-vaxxers’ at bay, such as social media executives deciding to flag anti-vax content or to remove the hashtags, notes or labels they occupy (Becker, 2019 / Liao, 2019 / Thompson, 2019).

The Anti-Vax movement was born from misinformation, one of the first instances of the ‘vaccines cause autism’ suggestion was in Andrew Wakefield’s article published in 1999 in ‘The Lancet’, a highly renowned peer-reviewed medical journal. This article has since then been proven to be fraudulent and retracted from the journal (Wakefield, 1999). In addition to this, authors who worked alongside Wakefield on this study have detached their assistance to him.  Unfortunately even after the paper was found to be falsified, a few others still kept the message of his study alive, with ‘vaccines cause autism’ still a large interest in anti-vax communities today. It was found that Wakefield most likely had a profit motive when he published his paper. Considering Brian Deer found that Wakefield had an undisclosed patent on a vaccine that would rival the MMR vaccine if his study was allowed to continue (Deer, 2004).

I believe that because of this gross misinformation, the anti-vax movement has continued to thrive for so long. This, in addition to the information provided by official healthcare bodies tends to be quite complex and cryptic for readers who haven’t the same level of education as those officials. Because of this, we’ve decided to base our campaign on providing more simplified versions of complicated scientific concepts to people who are generally less informed about vaccinations. Plus, we have tried to demonstrate the importance of vaccines and how they have helped our society so much up until this point. Considering that the movement doesn’t only affect anti-vaxxers, it affects the integrity of herd immunity, which is explained among other concepts through some of the content we have produced in our campaign.

To create the foundation for our campaign, we created a name for our brand: ‘Advance Immunity’ and a logo to tie all of our content together and social media pages together, having a logo also allows us to keep a general aesthetic theme throughout most of the content we create. When first starting the ideas process for this campaign, we decided that choosing multiple mediums would be beneficial, as our younger section of the target audience would be more likely to visit sites and engage with content that was quick to read, easily digestible and simple. Therefore we decided on creating short informational videos and quirky 1x1 images exclusively for instagram, and on the side presenting longer videos on facebook and more poster-like images.

These images and videos were posted on a basis to a schedule that we created, this was so we didn’t overflow our followers social feeds or become overbearing, which is generally quite hard to maintain. Some videos and images were created with memes in mind; using internet culture in order to create a viral aspect about the content we have. We had discussed how we wanted our content to affect people and what kind of genres we could lend traits from in order to create more solid videos and images that people would be able to watch with ease and share, even if they became controversial or came off as being rather offensive.

One of the videos we had produced was a short 15 minute documentary that features a retired GP, Dr. John Biggs. We decided to gain a professional input on our work seeing as the subject is so heavily related to medicine and research that we are not so well suited to. As part of this documentary, there is also an animated short that describes what vaccines are, how they work and what types of vaccines are being used, the information was provided to us by Fern Bamford-Elsdon who is at this time studying MA Pharmacy, meaning her information is extremely NEW. To create this documentary, we found it necessary to place the viewer in a calming or homely atmosphere, as the home sphere is more comforting than the clinical and alienating tone of a medical centre. Therefore we had Dr. Biggs relay the questions we had for him in his own home, with rather neutral lighting as so to keep the atmosphere. The animation was created by using 2D digital animation as this felt more textbook and simplistic than trying to create an overcomplicated animation, it’s colourful and understandable with a clear voice-over aiding the images on screen. Sections of the documentary focused on a more personal aspect as well, to humanise the topic at hand and to realise the real effect of vaccines. Overall, this documentary was successful in showing how vaccines are vital to the better working of our society and it describes quite tough concepts in a manageable format.

After completing our presentation, it’s evident that the work we have created has been quite successful in causing a ripple of people who are interested in our campaign, we found a rise in people engaging with our content, sharing it off to other pages and people. This and there were a few instances where we were contacted by individuals wishing to know more information about our campaign or other things regarding vaccines. Because of this I feel that our campaign was rather successful, it could’ve become more viral if perhaps we had spread our content through other social media sites and if we collaborated with other existing movements such as the ‘vaccines cause adults’ tag or ‘vaccines save lives’ tag, however this is a note in hindsight and the whole campaign feels to have engaged with the right people and affected many others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boseley, S. (2019). Half of new parents shown anti-vaccine misinformation on social media – report. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/24/anti-vaxxers-spread-misinformation-on-social-media-report

Becker, R. (2019). Facebook outlines plans to curb anti-vax conspiracy theories. The Verge.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18255107/facebook-anti-vaccine-misinformation-measles-outbreaks-group-page-recommendations-removal

Deer, B. (2004). MMR scare doctor planned rival vaccine. The Times.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mmr-scare-doctor-planned-rival-vaccine-zflnb0xwb7q

Liao, S. (2019). GoFundMe pledges to remove anti-vax campaigns. The Verge.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/22/18277367/gofundme-anti-vax-campaigns-remove-pledge

Pandolfi, F., Franza, L., Todi, L., Carusi, V., Centrone, M., Buonomo, A., Chini, R., Newton, E., Schiavino, D. and Nucera, E. (2019). The Importance of Complying with Vaccination Protocols in Developed Countries: “Anti-Vax” Hysteria and the Spread of Severe Preventable Diseases. Current Medicinal Chemistry, 25(42), pp.6070-6081.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29773050

Thompson, A. (2019). Instagram will BLOCK anti-vaxxer hashtags in crackdown on medical fake news on the social-media site. Mail Online.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6838249/Instagram-BLOCK-anti-vaxxer-hashtags-crackdown-medical-fake-news.html

Wakefield, AJ. (1999). MMR vaccination and autism. The Lancet, 354(9182), pp.949-950.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673605756968/fulltext

To start this campaign, we needed to know the basic outline of the audience, media, ideas and messages we will be putting forward. So we created a checklist of items that may be useful moving forward in the campaign.

These are a few of our initial ideas for the campaign, we had included many concepts for content that we could publish under our new title ‘Advance Immunity’. The next step was to create a logo of sorts to have an aesthetic image that binds all of our work together. 

After this, we created social media pages to have a common output of all of the work we would be creating and hopefully at some point, those images would be spread across the internet for a larger viewing.

https://www.instagram.com/advanceimmunity/?hl=en