Abstract
The spread of fake news and misinformation on social media is blamed as a primary cause of vaccine hesitancy, which is one of the major threats to global health, according to the World Health Organization. This paper studies the effect of the diffusion of misinformation on immunization rates in Italy by exploiting a quasi‐experiment that occurred in 2012, when the Court of Rimini officially recognized a causal link between the measles‐mumps‐rubella vaccine and autism and awarded injury compensation. To this end, we exploit the virality of misinformation following the 2012 Italian court's ruling, along with the intensity of exposure to nontraditional media driven by regional infrastructural differences in Internet broadband coverage. Using a Difference‐in‐Differences regression on regional panel data, we show that the spread of this news resulted in a decrease in child immunization rates for all types of vaccines.
Highlights
Several countries are experiencing outbreaks of vaccine‐preventable diseases, such as measles and diphtheria
Fake news and misinformation on social media are often blamed as the cause of the reduction in immunization rates worldwide
We exploited a quasi‐experiment that occurred in Italy when the Court of Rimini officially recognized a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism and awarded vaccine‐injury compensation
Summary
Several countries are experiencing outbreaks of vaccine‐preventable diseases, such as measles and diphtheria. In 2018, measles cases increased by 30% globally (World Health Organization, 2019). On 29 January 2019, Washington State officially declared a state of emergency due to a measles epidemic. In Europe, between 1 February 2017, and 31 January 2018, the European Surveillance System reported 14,732 cases of measles. Among European countries, Italy (4,978 cases) had the highest incidence, just after Romania (5,224 cases; European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2019). These worrying statistics led the World Health Organization to include Vaccine hesitancy—that is, the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines—as one of top 10 threats to global health today
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