As Finland started rolling out coronavirus vaccinations to all 12- to 15-year-olds from Monday this week, a parallel campaign of anti-vaccination disinformation began targeting the age group through social media channels, including the popular photo sharing site Instagram.
Many of the posts reference the Pelastetaan lapset (roughly translated as ‘Let’s Save the Children’ and not to be confused with the international ‘Save the Children’ charity or Pelastakaa Lapset in Finnish) website.
The ‘Let’s Save the Children’ site says that it wants to prevent coronavirus vaccinations being given to children and young people, citing a claim that there have been a record number of reports of harmful side effects from the jab.
For its part, the ‘Save the Children’ site released a statement (in Finnish) saying that the similarity of the two organisations’ names was “very unfortunate” and emphasised that it was not involved in any way with the anti-vaccine campaign.
Jarno Limnéll, Professor of cybersecurity at Aalto University, told that he considered the anti-vaccination Pelastetaan lapset group to be fundamentally suspicious and that the name was likely chosen deliberately to cause confusion.
“I think the choice of this confusing name was intentional. I find it very unfortunate,” Limnéll said, adding that he has closely followed the international debate on vaccine disinformation and wonders what lessons Finland can learn from it.
Vaccine specialist Mika Rämet of the Vaccine Research Centre at the University of Tampere told that the statements made by the ‘Let’s Save the Children’ group are incorrect and misleading, whether intentionally or unintentionally so.
“But it is intentional to present the vaccination of children and young people as being a bad thing,” he said.
He added that all of the information on the organisation’s website is misleading, citing one example of a claim made by the group that the World Health Organization (WHO) would not recommend vaccination for 12-15-year-olds.
“That’s not true. The WHO has outlined that the vaccine can be given to young people aged 12 years and up. Earlier, the WHO stated that vaccination of at-risk groups aged 12-15 is ok,” Rämet said, adding that the anti-vaccination campaigners make a number of distorted interpretations about the vaccine’s levels of protection against the virus as well as inaccurate information about the vaccine’s marketing authorisations by regulators.
“Firstly there is always a conditional marketing authorisation. That’s a normal sales route. And when it comes to vaccine protection, the study figures are deliberately interpreted in such a way that the importance of the vaccine seems to be kept to a minimum,” Rämet explained.
In a post on his blog (in Finnish) on the subject, Rämet said the anti-vaccine campaign had also deliberately misrepresented reports of side effects caused by coronavirus vaccines. On its website, the ‘Let’s Save the Children’ group claims that there have been numerous reports of serious side effects caused by the vaccine, but Rämet argued that the number of reports was not the most important factor.
Nevertheless the question is quite simple and still not answered by the Finnish government: why must youths get vaccinated without their agreement or parents approval?
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