November 29, 2020 – With a social media analysis, communication experts from the agency KOMM.PASSION wanted to find out who the people are who are skeptical about vaccinations. The result is a milieu study. It comes to surprising results.
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The demonstrations against the corona protective measures are gaining popularity, and there are even nightly street battles in Italy. People’s patience with the virus appears to be limited. So it should be practical for many that they supposedly find backing for their actually irresponsible actions in the global network. Because in numerous forums on Facebook, Instagram and Co. there are many self-appointed experts whose media reach is inversely related to the scientific verifiability of their statements. This is not a new phenomenon.
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Prof. Alexander Güttler. Photo: Matthias Heynen / komm.passion GmbH
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Especially when it comes to vaccination, one can say with regard to the Internet: There is nothing that does not exist on the subject. Unfortunately also a lot of false statements (to which one is not defenseless, by the way, as this article reported about the “infodemy” – pharmaceutical facts).
The whole thing has serious consequences, for example on people’s willingness to vaccinate. The agency KOMM.PASSION therefore wanted to know: Who are these people who are apparently immune to vaccinations? And how can you reach them?
A conversation with Professor Alexander Güttler. The journalist and marketing specialist is the founder and CEO of KOMM.PASSION.
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Prof. Güttler, what is an anti-vaccination refuser?
Prof. Güttler: It’s a play on words: We refuse to oppose vaccination because it is a step backwards when blanket opposition to vaccination becomes socially acceptable. People who oppose or refuse to vaccinate are people who say: I don’t want to be vaccinated. I don’t want my children to be vaccinated. And with the Corona story, they have gained significantly in popularity. In the middle of the year, according to surveys, around two thirds wanted to be vaccinated, but the number of those who are urgently waiting for the corona vaccination is now just over half. The rather loud argument about vaccination on social media seems to be working. We know this development from other vaccinations: As with measles, by the way, it was still a deadly disease in the 1960s, where vaccination is partly under discussion again today. Considerable irrationalities are at play here. And we have to counter this – as anti-vaccination refusers.
So that’s why the milieu study? To find out who the people are who see themselves as vaccine skeptical?
Güttler: Yes exactly. You can hear the loud screaming. You see this cookbook author Hildmann fidgeting across the stage and you ask yourself: What is actually behind it? If you then do some research, you can see that there There are, for example, a large number of forums on Facebook in which discussions are held and which have such nice names as “Vaccination Criticism”, “Vaccination-Free”, “No to Vaccination” or “Life without Vaccination”. The size of these groups is sometimes limited, but the interesting thing is that they are very well networked – also to other, more neutral groups. This means that what is being discussed is getting through relatively well.
Güttler: We have PAS for this – especially when it comes to Facebook or Instagram. That stands for Pragmatic Analytic Services. We do that together with Dr. Klaus Holthausen, who is one of the people who helped invent the topic of artificial intelligence in Germany in the 1990s. We have developed a mathematical bridge so that we can map our analyzes in Sinus-SIGMA milieus, for example. In short: We wanted to know how these anti-vaccination campaigners, who use social media, can be assigned to these classic milieus.
And?
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Güttler: It was interesting that most milieus have a relatively manageable number of opponents against vaccinations. That’s between three and eight percent. But one milieu falls out completely. These are the liberal intellectuals. They are around thirty percent. That is already clear and can hardly be a statistical error. But of course more studies would be needed to verify that. This is now a highlight. But it is a result that naturally makes us think, because that is the elite of our society.
So one could say – admittedly a bit flatly -: The more high school graduation the more opposition to vaccinations?
Güttler: That is actually too flat. The elite of our society, i.e. those who have higher positions, a higher level of education, who have more money and power, can be divided into three groups. There are the more conservative elites and there is little opposition to vaccination among them. There seems to be a high sense of responsibility towards society – they vaccinate themselves. Then there is the postmodern milieu, which is more experimental and even those – at least in our analyzes – opposition to vaccinations is less pronounced. In the middle lie the liberal intellectuals, i.e. those who carry the subject of responsibility, social and ecological, critical spirit, etc. like a torch in front of them and also consume it in a very demanding manner. And interestingly enough, this elite doesn’t seem to be doing its job justice: they don’t do what they say. By the way: this may well have something to do with the generally perceived distrust of elites. If you have people who preach a lot, but even then say to their daughter, “No, the HPV vaccine, I’ll leave it. It could – I read that somewhere – have some side effect. “
A very clear criticism …
Güttler: It kind of reminds me of George Orwell. He called this phenomenon “thinking twice”; In other words: to say one thing and basically do exactly the other and simply show a sense of responsibility on the surface.
Güttler: I think so. We see that with the whole issue of alternative facts as well. That many are now acting with different truths at the same time. If this becomes a symbol of the times and of elites, then we really don’t have to worry about a loss of trust any more.
Were you surprised by the results of your study?
Güttler: Yes. I had feared it, but not in this clarity.
What do we learn from the results? What do we do with it now?
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Güttler: From my point of view we learn several things from this. We need a movement back to rationality and to the facts. We have to defend ourselves much more clearly against alternative facts and fake news. From my point of view, what we experience when we are not vaccinated is something very extreme. There are few things that have benefited humanity as much as vaccination. Incredible diseases have been eradicated. I was born in 1960 and I still remember many who have had polio. There were significant deaths from measles, and diphtheria was a huge international issue. And if we think back a little longer, we come to completely different, considerably worse diseases. We did this because we as a society advocated immunity – the ugly word “herd immunity” – and if we lose that, then it has something to do with a society’s loss of solidarity. I think we have to take massive action against this. In Germany, we need a round table, as has already been called for on pharmaceutical facts, so that the issue of vaccination is more widely known – also for liberal intellectuals.
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