In the end, it was proved that Wakefield and the co-authors of the article had conflicts of interest and the journal was forced to publish a retraction but, despite that, this belief is still maintained today. This sonorous article caused a 9% drop in the vaccination rate in the United Kingdom in just one year. This movement won strength in 1998 when Wakefield published an article in “The Lancet”, in which he related the possibility of suffering autism with the administration of the vaccine against rubella, mumps and measles. From this point, a rise in England’s first compulsory vaccination through a strong campaign began to appear unhappy, which led to the constitution of the League against Mandatory Vaccination of London in 1867, and it began to spread this movement to the rest of Europe. The rejection of immunization by the population was born with the creation of the first vaccine in 1796 when Jenner presented protection against smallpox to the Royal Society of London. The anti-vaccine groups are able to use social networks and their resources to increase their number and do so through controversial arguments, such as the economic benefit of pharmaceuticals or personal stories of children to move the population without using reliable or evidence-based content. In addition, the arguments that they use focus on possible harmful effects and the distrust of pharmaceuticals, promoting the use of social networks as a resource for finding health-related information.
To do this, these groups use different methods, including bots and trolls that generate anti-vaccination messages and spread quickly. Social networks are used by the anti-vaccine groups to disseminate their information. The final sample was n = 12, including only articles published in the last 10 years, in English or Spanish. The search equations were: “vaccine AND social network” and “vaccine AND (Facebook OR Twitter OR Instagram OR YouTube)”. A systematic review was performed in PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL and CUIDEN databases.
The aim of this study was to analyze social networks’ information about the anti-vaccine movement.
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