One doctor and vaccine advocate keeps a fat folder of nasty messages he's received so that 'if someone kills me, my wife can give it to the police.' He does not laugh when he says this.
In the ongoing -- and sometimes vicious -- vaccination debates online, pediatricians who are vocal vaccine advocates have become frequent targets of anti-vaxers.
Dr. Paul Offit keeps a fat folder of nasty messages he's received so that"if someone kills me, my wife can give it to the police." He does not laugh when he says this."Rot in hell you baby killer," one Facebook user wrote in an email to Offit, who is director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
How vaccines stop diseases like measles 01:26Some of the comments claimed the HPV vaccine kills people, and that the pediatric practice should stop seeing patients, given their vaccine promotion efforts, said Beth Hoffman, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and a researcher with the university's Center for Research on Media Technology and Health, who was first author of the study.
Facebook to crack down on anti-vaccine misinformation 01:20"The study confirms that Facebook is now a key disseminator for those misinformation websites," he said.Facebook announced earlier this month that it plans to reduce the spread of vaccine-related misinformation in its news feed and search options by lowering the ranking of groups and pages that make false claims on its platform.
"I don't engage with the individuals who target me in this way because I believe they are looking to insult and be inflammatory rather than to start a conversation," she said."I also believe these conversations are not to be had online, where vulnerable parents can fall prey to misinformation, but rather in an office with a trusted provider who parents know have their best interest at heart."CNN's Elizabeth Cohen and John Bonifield contributed to this report.
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