When Facebook becomes the doctor

By Herman M. Lagon

A mother is waiting for the rice to cook when she opens Facebook. She scrolls past a birthday greeting, a funny video, somebody selling ukay-ukay, and a friend’s vacation photos. Then a woman appears on her feed warning parents not to have their children vaccinated against measles.

The vaccine, the woman claims, contains “human placenta,” dangerous chemicals, and substances that could damage children’s organs. She sounds convincing. The video looks serious. Thousands of people have shared it. The comments are full of worried parents.

So, the mother pauses. What if this is true? That little pause is where our problem begins.

The story is not imaginary. AFP reported that a video making those claims gathered more than two million views while the Philippines was conducting its measles-rubella vaccination campaign. Experts said the claims were false. One of the scary-sounding ingredients mentioned, “dihydrogen monoxide,” is simply water. The vaccine does not contain human placenta, and measles vaccines have been studied and used for decades.

But facts have an annoying disadvantage online. They are rarely as exciting as fear.

“Millions of children have safely received this vaccine” does not stop the thumb quite like “Don’t let them inject this into your child!”

And if you are a parent, I understand the instinct. When it comes to our children, even a tiny doubt can become a very big one. We can dismiss a rumor about ourselves. A rumor about something being injected into our child is different.

That is why simply calling hesitant parents ignorant does not help. Most of them are not trying to endanger their children. They are trying to protect them. The problem is that somebody else may have reached them first.

Today, that somebody is often Facebook. We are already seeing what online fear can do. In Bohol, only around 7,400 of nearly 100,000 targeted children had been vaccinated by August 13. Misinformation was among the reasons cited.

My daughter, Dr. Parvane Mae, sees this too in the community where she serves as a Doctor to the Barrio. Some parents simply want answers; others arrive already worried by something they saw online. It must be frustrating to spend years studying medicine and then compete with someone who needed only sixty seconds and a cellphone.

Still, the health worker cannot simply say, “That’s nonsense. Next patient.” Because the fear may be based on nonsense, but the frightened parent is real. And Filipino parents did not become suspicious in a vacuum.

Dengvaxia left a long shadow. Migriño et al. (2020) found that most parents still believed vaccines protected children, but more than a third had hesitated or refused at least one. Safety concerns and negative media information mattered.

Measles does not care about our uncertainty. In 2019, 66 percent of recorded cases and 79 percent of deaths had no vaccination history.

Measles does not care why a child was left unprotected. It does not ask whether the parent believed a Facebook post, remembered Dengvaxia, could not leave work, lived too far from the health center, or simply kept saying, “Sa sunod na lang.”

It only needs the opening.

This is where social media has changed the game. Watch one frightening vaccine video and another may appear. Stop long enough on a conspiracy post and the algorithm learns something about you. Soon your feed begins filling with people saying roughly the same thing.

After a while, repetition begins to feel like evidence. Basi tuod gid man. Damo man naga-post. That makes critical thinking less of a classroom phrase and more of an everyday survival skill.

As a teacher, I find myself thinking differently now about what it means to teach students to evaluate sources. It is not merely something they need for the Review of Related Literature. They need it when they open TikTok at midnight, when something alarming appears in the family group chat, and when a relative forwards a message beginning with “Please share before Facebook deletes this.”

Who said it? Where did it come from? What evidence is offered? Is the person qualified to make the claim? Can it be verified somewhere trustworthy?

Public officials and other influential people have a responsibility here as well. What a mayor, barangay captain, teacher, priest, celebrity, doctor, or popular content creator shares carries weight precisely because people trust the person sharing it. Migriño et al. identified health workers and political leaders among important community supporters of vaccination.

One careless post can deepen suspicion. One calm conversation can also bring a frightened parent back. And perhaps we should be more careful with the label “anti-vaxxer.”

There is the person who spends all day manufacturing conspiracy theories. Then there is the mother who remembers what happened during Dengvaxia and wants reassurance. There is the father who cannot afford to miss a day’s work to bring his child to the health center. There is the grandmother who heard from a neighbor that vaccines cause fever and became frightened. There are families in communities where health services are simply harder to reach.

These people should not automatically be placed in the same box. UNICEF’s account of the 2019 measles crisis pointed not only to misinformation but also to poverty, problems in vaccine management, shortages of health workers, and difficulties reaching mobile and marginalized communities. Sometimes a child is unvaccinated because a parent refuses. Sometimes the parent is willing but the system has failed to reach the child.

Both problems matter. So perhaps the best response to vaccine hesitancy is not another giant tarpaulin announcing “Bakuna ay Ligtas.”

Sometimes it is a health worker pulling up a chair. “Nanay, ano gid bala ang ginakabalak-an mo?” And then actually listening.

There is something deeply human about that. People rarely surrender fear because somebody threw statistics at them. They change their minds when they feel heard, when somebody they trust explains things clearly, and when their questions are answered without making them feel foolish for asking.

We should be equally straightforward about vaccines themselves. Like other medicines, they can have side effects. Serious reactions are possible, but extremely rare. The danger posed by measles itself is much greater. Saying that plainly is more credible than pretending there is absolutely nothing to discuss.

There is a strange irony in all this. Generations before us watched children die from diseases they could do little to prevent. We live at a time when vaccines against many of those diseases are available in our health centers.

Yet sometimes the harder task is convincing people to take them. Science has become remarkably good at producing vaccines. We are still figuring out how to rebuild trust.

Perhaps that job belongs to all of us—to doctors who explain, nurses who reassure, teachers who teach children how to question what they see online, journalists who check before publishing, officials who think before sharing, and families willing to ask one more question before believing the frightening thing on the screen.

But Facebook is a terrible family doctor. And when our children’s health is involved, perhaps the simplest habit is still the wisest one:

Before trusting the person on your screen, talk to the person who actually studied how to keep your child well.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.