Heidi Larson, the anthropologist who whispered to anti-vaccines

The Anglo-Saxons use the expression

(literally, "think outside the box"), and it can correspond to those rare initiatory moments in which, finally, the correct perspective is captured to tackle a problem. For Heidi Larson (Boston, 64 years old), the spark jumped one winter day in New Delhi (India). Aboard a taxi, in the middle of an endless traffic jam and crushed by a cacophony of horns and screams and suffocating pollution, the American anthropologist read a half-erased sign on the side of the road: “You are not stuck in traffic. You are the traffic. He tells about it in his book

Caught: How Vaccine Rumors Start and Why They Don't Go Away. “That moment, that mantra, has stayed with me ever since (…) The difference in perspective, language and experience that defines the tension between scientists and non-scientists, between those who watch traffic, count cars, study trends and advise on the rules, and those who are stuck in the jam, frustrated, in the middle of the herd, who think that their voices are not being heard, is an allegory of the dynamics that drive the global anti-vaccine movements”, he writes in that work not translated into Spanish.

Larson, an anthropologist and professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, one of the university centers most involved in understanding and combating the coronavirus, founded more than a decade ago, with modest means, the

. Confidence in Vaccines).

Today he advises governments and institutions around the world, in rich and not-so-rich countries, that face visceral rejection by the population of immunization campaigns.

An unexpected hindrance that prevents us from fully celebrating the great scientific achievement, the enormous hope that came with finding the vaccines against covid-19 in record time.

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"The denial movements are the most extreme part of all this," Larson explains to the medical journal

. “I am more concerned about that other 80% who are in the middle, increasingly skeptical and doubtful about vaccines, fueled in large part by digital technology and an excess of information at their fingertips. It is a turning point. For years we have relied on a social contract that worked, thanks to a very accommodating citizenry. The challenge now comes from the fact that all these little pockets of resistance have started to communicate with each other,” Larson warns.

Perhaps due to the fact of being the daughter of a Protestant pastor, involved in the fight for civil rights in the United States and always ready to question the imposed official truth, or because of that naive character that leads many Americans to "think outside the box ”, Larson was building for years a practical methodology to combat rumors against vaccines. His travels around the world, working for the UN, Unicef ​​or the World Health Organization (WHO), alternating with a round trip to the University to complete and expand his studies, gave him an experience and knowledge that, with the unexpected arrival of the coronavirus, have been invaluable.

And its main conclusion is revealing: distrust in vaccines is, above all, distrust in those who manufacture them or in the government that imposes their distribution. That is why it is useless —and frustrating— on many occasions to appeal to rational and scientific arguments to combat rumours.

Paradoxically, skepticism has spread more in the last pandemic among the societies of the richest nations and, apparently, better informed. The Nigerian mothers' rebellion against the polio vaccine in 2004, which Larson experienced firsthand, lasted 11 months and cost the lives of up to half a million children. A door-to-door explanatory campaign was necessary in which listening was just as important as convincing. And the rebuilding of trust required gestures such as the construction of drinking water wells in some towns, the sending of samples of the vaccine to a “trustworthy” Muslim country like Indonesia for approval, or the deployment of mobile units to immunize to the population and, incidentally, attend to the medical needs of the people.

In the age of social networks, in which personal experiences and feelings have redoubled their importance, Larson suggests, science, that agent of liberation that arrived with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, may also have become for some a new dogma.

And just as necessary as citizens understanding the science behind vaccines is that scientists understand the hidden reasons behind citizens' doubts.

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