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Pinterest Cracks Down on Anti-Vaxxers, Pressuring Facebook To Follow (cnbc.com)
Social network Pinterest has taken a big step to stop the spread of false content that is damaging people's health, which could put pressure on competitors to follow. From a report: Pinterest said Wednesday that it would no longer return any search results, including pins and boards, for terms related to vaccinations, whether in favor or against them. It took that step in late 2018 after noticing that the majority of shared images on Pinterest cautioned people against vaccinations, despite medical guidelines demonstrating that most vaccines are safe for most people. Pinterest told CNBC on Wednesday that it's been hard to remove this anti-vaccination content entirely, so it put the ban in place until it can figure out a more permanent strategy. It's working with health experts including doctors, as well as the social media analysis company called Storyful to come up with a better solution, the company said.
How? How is someone who isn't vaccinated harmful to someone who is? Isn't that the whole point of vaccinations? Or, do they not work?
Vaccinations work, but they are not 100% effective. An important measure of infectious diseases is the basic reproduction number, or R-nought. This represents the average number of infections that one sick person will create. Suppose mumps has an R-nought of 5, and you have a vaccine with 90% effectiveness, then the effective R-nought, after vaccination, is 0.5.
The critical point is an R-nought of 1. If you get below that, the diseases is expected to die out over time. If it is higher, then the disease is expected to grow. Getting the value from 5 to 0.5 will make a huge difference, which you would get if everybody is vaccinated. If too few people are vaccinated, R-nought will grow, and disease can spread, and will also infect 10% of the vaccinated population.
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