Can You Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind? Lee McIntyre Says Yes

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, the U.N. secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, has been addressing leaders in New York today. He says, the world has never been more divided.

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ANTONIO GUTERRES, U.N. SECRETARY-GENERAL: On one hand, we see vaccines develop in record time. A victory of science and human ingenuity. On the other hand, we see their triumph and damn (ph) by the treasury of lack of political will, selfishness and mistrust.

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AMANPOUR: With mistrust comes disinformation, of course. Lee McIntyre, research fellow at Boston University examines this in his new book, “How to Talk to a Science Denier.” And here he is telling Michel Martin what we must do about the conspiracies that keep gaining dangerous ground around us.

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MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Professor Lee McIntire, thank you so much for joining us.

LEE MCINTIRE, AUTHOR, “HOW TO TALK TO A SCIENCE DENIER”: Thank you for having me back.

MARTIN: Your book is called “How to Talk to a Science Denier” and I’m tempted to go, just please, how do we? But let’s back up for a minute.

MCINTYRE: OK.

MARTIN: Because how would you say sort of science denialism started in this country? Because I think particularly, once the space exploration started, I thought, you know, Americans sort of took pride in their interest in science, in their commitment to science. So, I’m asking like, when did this science denialism start in the United States?

MCINTYRE: Well, Americans have tended to love science, but I’m not sure they’ve always understood it and they’ve always reserved the right to be skeptical of anything that they didn’t want to believe. And so, you know, understanding that that was out there, it was just a matter of the — really, the first disinformation campaign around science in the modern era, which was the cigarette companies, the tobacco companies in the 1950s who came together at the plaza hotel because there was an impending study that was going to show that smoking was linked with lung cancer, and they brought in a public relations expert who advised them to fight the science. And so, that’s exactly what they did. Of course, before social media, they took out full page ads in American newspapers, reached about a sixth of the American population. And they hired some scientists in a precursor to the American Tobacco Institute. And they didn’t need to prove that cigarette smoking didn’t cause lung cancer. All they needed to do was to make it sound like the scientists publishing the other study were hasty, that there was a debate and that we needed to slow down and reconsider the question, which they managed to turn into a 40 yearlong campaign of continuing to sell cigarettes while there really wasn’t any scientific doubt.

MARTIN: So, now, I think a lot of us are seeing how this is playing out with people who are resisting vaccinations, that are resisting mask mandates. So, what percentage — I don’t know if this is a productive way to think about it, but what would you say sort of a percentage of the American population that are science deniers?

MCINTYRE: It depends on the topic. It’s hard to get a reliable number just in general, but, you know, when you think about COVID denial, anti-vax, climate denial, flat earth, evolution denial, you know, you could put different numbers on different ones. The most recent statistic I saw, now this was pre-COVID, this was anti-vax, pre-COVID, was that 22 percent of Americans self-identified as anti-vax. That’s a pretty high percentage if you think about it.

MARTIN: And then, we have seen these, I don’t know, really shocking videos of incidents across the country where people are getting to physical altercations around mask wearing. We’ve seen this at school board meetings. We’ve seen this on the street.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No more masks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Keep it calm. Keep it calm.

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MARTIN: What do you think that’s about?

MCINTYRE: Look, it’s important to remember that with beliefs around these sorts of topics, with science denial beliefs in general, you’re not — when you attack somebody’s beliefs, you’re not just attacking what they think, you’re attacking who they are. So, you know, if you think about somebody who believes that, you know, rebreathing into a mask is going to give them carbon dioxide poisoning or somebody who is skeptical of vaccines but thinks that Ivermectin is OK, those are not evidence-based beliefs. Those are ideological beliefs. They got there from somewhere. They got them, really, from a disinformation campaign. Somebody wanted them to believe that. And so, you know, once they’ve taken that up, once that becomes part of their belief system, to challenge them is really a sort of a direct insult to them as a person. Now, compare that with the way that scientists think about a belief. You know, if you give me the evidence, I’ll change my belief. That’s the way science is supposed to work. In this case, these are not scientific beliefs, these are denialist beliefs where there’s something else is on the line, their ideology, their politics, you know, there’s something else going on.

MARTIN: There’s so many things about your book that I found fascinating, but one of them was that a number of people who are, in fact, science deniers, don’t think that they are. They think that they just have questions, or they actually think that they are following their own scientific method, but only so far and a lot of it is just garbage science. And I’m just — so, I was so fascinated by that. What’s that about?

MCINTYRE: I’ve met a denier. Everyone claims that they’re being more scientific than the scientists. I think the whole thing gets back to this question of skepticism because skepticism is an important part of science. I mean, scientists, they’re supposed to be skeptical, they’re supposed to also be openminded to new evidence but they’re supposed to be skeptical until something has been, you know, demonstrated based on the evidence. What I’ve noticed often happens with deniers is that they will consider themselves skeptics but they really don’t understand what the term means. For instance, they — I guess, they’re what I call cafeteria skeptics. They will believe in science. They’re not anti-science. They will believe in science on the things that, you know, don’t step on their ideological beliefs or their political beliefs. But then when scientists cross over into territory that something that they feel personally committed to, then all of a sudden, they’ll ask for proof. Well, science doesn’t work that way. Science doesn’t work on the basis of proof and certainty, it works on the basis of evidence and what they call warrant, you know, is there enough sufficient — is there sufficient warrant for your beliefs? So, the problem with science deniers is that they think of themselves as skeptical, but what they actually are is more opportunistic, and in some cases, quite gullible. I mean, think about the mindset of someone who doesn’t understand or won’t accept the scientific evidence which shows that the vaccines are safe and effective, but will watch a news program and then go out and buy Ivermectin, that’s a quite gullible thing to do. And it comes back to my idea that science denial was not really based on doubt, it’s distrust. Because if you doubted something, that can be overcome by evidence. But if you distrust the person who’s done the research or who’s sharing the evidence with you, that really can’t be overcome through evidence. And so, that makes it, you know, much harder to get past.

MARTIN: You know I have to ask you about Nicki Minaj, right? You know, I have to. Because this — as we are speaking now like one of the big stories around is this, you know, yes, famous pop star, Nicki Minaj. So, she says that she was skeptical of the vaccine and she’s doing her research, but she said she is not getting — or hasn’t gotten it to this point because her cousin’s friend in Trinidad have some — she says, had reported some unusual side effect related to his genitalia after having — and this caught — and the reason we’re bringing this up is because it caused a huge ruckus. The public health minister of Trinidad had to go and have a press conference saying that they had investigated this matter and that this is not the case. Like, what is that? This is an intelligent person.

MCINTYRE: That’s right.

MARTIN: Who’s very efficacious about her career and other things. You see my point? That’s what I’m asking you.

MCINTYRE: And that’s why people are so worried about it. That’s why, I think, President Biden had offered to call her, because somebody with a big platform like that can amplify disinformation and it reaches millions of people. And remember what I said, they don’t have to prove it, it just has to raise enough doubt that it keeps people from getting the vaccine. Here’s the problem. Nicki Minaj didn’t — and I wager her cousin or even her cousin’s friend didn’t come up with that on their own. That was fed to them, that was disinformation that was the result of a propaganda campaign of someone who wanted to put that out there, and they feed — the people who create this information feed that sort of thing out there. And then, people who get victimized by it.

MARTIN: What you’re saying in your book is that maybe it’s less productive to ask why do people believe that than to ask who wants them to believe that?

MCINTYRE: That’s right.

MARTIN: So, who wants people to believe misinformation about the COVID vaccines?

MCINTYRE: It’s a great question. And I’m glad you asked it because very few people are talking about that. We seem to be, for the most part, in government, in media, treating all of this disinformation as misinformation, and thinking that it’s an accident or it’s a mistake. It’s not. Science denial is not a mistake. It’s a lie. And a lie is intentionally created by somebody for a purpose, somebody who’s profiting by it. We already saw how the tobacco companies could profit from the doubt that they raised, you know, out of thin air. So, sometimes, the way that people profit from disinformation is economic. Let’s say that happens with climate change as well. But sometimes it’s ideological or political. And in this case, I think that a lot of the anti-vax, especially the anti- COVID vaccine propaganda is coming out of foreign intelligence services, most egregiously, out of Russia. Now, you don’t have to break into CIA headquarters to know that this is the case. This was all in the major media in about March of this year. And then, it was a one or two-day story and nobody looked at it very much after that. But what seems to have happened is that the — Putin has a — there was a story in the “New York Times” I think a year and a half ago called Putin’s Long War Against American Science. He has been interested, especially around health-related issues, of polarizing Americans, having us at each other’s throats, really creating chaos, you know, this confusion, this, you know, raising doubt and distrust where there shouldn’t be any, and it’s shocking. So, I mean, the question you ask is precisely the right one, not, why do people believe such things, but who wants them to believe it? And that’s what we should be asking about Nicki Minaj, by the way, not why she believes it. She believes it because somebody told her and she doubts. You know, she’s raising questions that everybody raises. We’ve all got cognitive biases, we all trust the people around us. The real question is, who wants her to believe that? And the answer is the people who created that disinformation around things like that the vaccines had microchips in them or the most recent one, that it will cause people to go infertile.

MARTIN: Earlier this year, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found just 12 people are responsible for the majority of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines on social media. What do you make of that?

MCINTYRE: It was actually not just a majority, it was 65 percent, which is quite a bit. People who are amplifying misinformation this way, they don’t have to be that many of them. I mean, once you figure out how twitter works, once you figure out how social media works, you know, people understand that they can amplify their message out to millions of people, and that’s a very bad thing. I think of that as sort of a pinch point in the disinformation network when you realize that it’s so few people who have such a big megaphone. And another statistic that I heard was that on Facebook, they did an internal study that got leaked and it was reported in the “Washington Post,” 50 percent of the anti-vax propaganda on Facebook was due to 111 people. That’s not that many people. I mean, you’re probably never going to convince those 111 people or those, you know, dozen people. But if you found a way to keep them from amplifying their disinformation quite so much, coupled with mandates, I think that might be the way to go.

MARTIN: And what’s their agenda? What do they want?

MCINTYRE: It depends. In some cases, they want to make more money. In some cases, they want attention. In some cases, they’re true believers. I think that often different types of science denial have different motivations. Quite a bit of it now is based on ideological or political polarization. I think that in some cases, we’re now so polarized that, you know, people get the script that this is what folks on our team believe. And so, they go ahead and believe it.

MCINTYRE: What is to be done here? You’ve written a whole book about it. How do we talk to a science denier and is there any evidence that makes a difference?

MCINTYRE: There are three problems. One is the creation of disinformation. The other is the amplification of disinformation, which can be on social media or partisan media. And the third is the uptake of the disinformation. What happens, you know, once people already start to believe it? What can you do? The mistake, I think, is when we go at it with the idea that they — with something called the information deficit model. All we need to do is give them the facts and they’ll be convinced. Well, that doesn’t work because, again, if this is part of somebody’s identity, you know, sharing new facts is just not going to do it. What you have to do, the appropriate way to handle it, one I advocate in my book, is to build trust. If you look at the anecdotal accounts of people who have changed their mind about vaccines, about COVID, and about climate change, they all happen because that person was approached by somebody that they trusted. Somebody who engaged with them. So, you shouldn’t yell at somebody, obviously, or insult them. That’s just going to put up the wall of distrust. The best way to approach it is with patience and calm and respect, and to actually listen to what the person’s concerns are.

MARTIN: It sounds like a slow, long process though. I think a lot of people are sick of these people. I mean, I think they’re sick of people who they feel are endangering the health of their neighbors, friends and fellow countrymen’s school children because of their intransigence on this issue. So, I guess what I’m asking you is, you know, it that — it just sounds like a long slow process. Is that the only choice?

MCINTYRE: You know, to the folks who don’t want to do this, I say, what’s your plan? What would you do instead? Science denial is just going to continue to get worse. If you yell at them, maybe you’ll feel better but you’re not going to convert anyone. And the last time I checked, this problem is getting worse and worse. Because over my shoulder, I see that it’s not just science denial. We’ve now got QAnon. We’ve got the folks who maintain that the 2020 election was stolen. That the protesters on January 6th were peaceful protesters. This is all from the same blueprint, the same type of reasoning, this is all denialist reasoning. And I think that we need to figure out how we’re going to do it. Once this problem has gotten out into the community, and you got people who are self-identifying as anti-vaxxers, what’s going to get through to them? I think that the only thing that’s going to get through to them is empathy. If we’re just going to stay home and be right, then we’re in trouble. And by the way, we’re deniers too. We’re deniers because there’s scientific evidence now, there was a study in nature human behavior in the summer of 2019 which provided the first empirical evidence to show that this was possible, that this actually worked. So, to the people who say, oh, I don’t want to bother because it won’t work, they’re wrong. This can work. I went to a flat earth convention. You don’t have to do that, but you do have to talk to your uncle at Thanksgiving or pull your cousin aside or, you know, your friend, somebody that you can make a difference with. And don’t just have one conversation, have many conversations. Let’s start to get a virtue of circle working rather than a vicious circle. And I think we could make some difference on this.

MARTIN: Professor Lee McIntyre, thank you so much for talking with us today.

MCINTYRE: Thanks for having me back. I enjoyed it.