Lies flourish on social media

Misinformation about the coronavirus, and especially about vaccines, is still largely present on social networks, but not in the Montenegrin media.

This was assessed for "Vijesti" by the Raskrinkavanje portal, the platform of the Center for Democratic Transition (CDT), whose primary goals are to oppose media manipulations, increase the quality of media content, media literacy of readers, and respect for professional standards on the media scene.

"Now that a significant part of the population has been vaccinated, the most common misinformation we come across is that someone has died as a result of the vaccine. Almost every sudden death of a young person, especially if it is world famous, whether it is an athlete, an artist, tries to connect it with vaccination against covid-19. Without any evidence, of course," claims the editor-in-chief of that portal Darvin Murić.

He explained that disinformation followed the course of the pandemic and in some way "coordinated" with it.

"At the very beginning of the pandemic, claims that the virus did not actually exist and that it was just an ordinary flu dominated. As the pandemic gained momentum, disinformation about the alleged falsification of the number of infected people followed, and when talk began about the vaccine, the story started that Bill Gates wants to microchip us and reduce the population", said Murić.

He reminded that with the beginning of vaccination, the talk about forced vaccination started, and the more citizens were vaccinated, the more it was said that the vaccine caused serious illnesses and even death.

During this year, however, less misinformation regarding the coronavirus was recorded, considering that the number of patients has been decreasing for months. Some of the misinformation that marked the year 2021 is that vaccines cause AIDS, lead to heart attacks, weaken libido and potency.

One of the last, published by an American feminist Naomi Wolf, is that covid vaccines increase the risk of spontaneous abortions, and that babies of vaccinated mothers die more often.

However, this has not been confirmed by any scientific study.

On the website vaccine.ba, whose work is supported by UNICEF and USAID in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and which is edited by a biological and scientific journalist Jelena Kalinic, it is stated that large studies on the safety of vaccines conducted in the general population do not show an increased risk of miscarriage after vaccination, and that Dr. Viki Male, who teaches reproductive immunology at King's College London.

In another author's article, also from this year, Kalinić also writes that previous safety monitoring of vaccines against covid-19 show that these vaccines do not cause swelling, nor inflammation of the testicles, nor reduce sexual desire and disrupt male hormones.

"As said Dr Emma Duncan, professor of clinical endocrinology at King's College London, 'male fertility and covid-19 vaccines have been studied for mRNA vaccines and there is no evidence that vaccination affects sperm count or motility or male fertility. There is evidence that men who recover from moderately severe covid-19 have reduced sperm quality even 1-2 months after the disease, compared to men who have a mild or asymptomatic infection," explained Kalinić.

The myth that vaccines cause heart attacks, for which there is no scientific evidence, is also debunked in detail on the vaccine.ba website. Namely, it is true that mRNA vaccines can cause myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle, the most common cause of which is a viral infection) and pericarditis (inflammation of the heart tissue), but these are very rare side effects.

However, the Council of Europe (CoE), in the study "Information Disruption: How to Interdisciplinary Research and Policy Creation", emphasized that, regardless of the fact that there is an "expansion of initiatives aimed at uncovering and verifying facts", it is urgently necessary to establish mechanisms which would "most effectively recognize what actually causes the audience's curiosity and skepticism about the information they consume and the sources of that data".

"Simply throwing out more 'factual information', without sufficient understanding of the emotional and ritual elements of communication, can be a waste of time and resources," warned the authors of the SE study. Claire Wardle, Anne Burns i Nick Dias.