Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Vanness and every week I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode I'm joined by Dr. Kalina Coltai where I ask her,

What do we do about all this vaccine misinformation?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Vanness. I'm so excited for this guest. I'm so excited for this topic.

Even though it is like one of the more upsetting things of our time, but we're going to kind of put an interesting spin on it as we so often do. Welcome to the show, Kalina Coltai, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for an informed public at the University of Washington.

She researches how people make decisions and form opinions based on what they see on social networking sites and in digital communities.

You guys, if you need to pause that, rewind it and listen to it again. Maybe you should because essentially, Kalina is saving the world and researching how to do so. So welcome to the show, Kalina, how are you?

I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me and what a wonderful intro. I'm going to use that for all my other future intros.

I mean, you really should and also just so people know, Kalina's already aware, you have this coolest hair. You've got this like dusty rose gold bleach and tone. People can't see it because they're obviously listening, but like, oh my gosh, I've so clapping for the color. I just had to put it out there. Okay. Thank you.

I had all of a sudden, just like several people in my life that I realized were choosing not to be vaccinated. And the reason for their choosing to not be vaccinated in literally every case came from rumors that they had seen online or someone had told them around dangerous from the vaccine.

I just assumed that I was tromping at the bit to get that fucker when I got the vaccine. I was like, this is the first time in my life that HIV has ever like scored me a win because I was able to get the vaccine and like march a little early because I'm HIV positive.

It didn't ever occur to me that people were going to like not want to take the vaccine because it seems like such a clear way out of this mess. And I really love that you research how people make decisions based on opinions that they have seen on social media and social networking sites.

It's so important for us to understand how people come to these conclusions.

You actually point out like already in the subscription, something that's actually really telling about the sort of widespread vaccine hesitancy that we've been seeing here, which is that there's a lot of different reasons why.

And in reality, a lot of us know someone even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I'd have so many colleagues fellow academics, people at conferences, just you know, in my day to day who would say like either they had vaccine hesitancy or they have a loved one.

You know, someone tried to talk about their sister, you didn't want to vaccinate their kid for, you know, the MMR vaccine. I never blame anyone. If you someone who's experiencing vaccine hesitancy, particularly over the past years, so many people even people who got vaccinated, some people had the reaction like, should I just experiencing some hesitancy.

I don't think it's inherently about thing. I want that to be a reminder to everyone that we talk to in the show is that it's it's never never demonized anyone for experiencing some vaccine hesitancy. It's a very real emotional. We all have.

Okay, so can I ask something about that really quick?

Oh, yeah, sure.

I was like really trying to come from like this place of compassion for like a hot minute from like, you know, I was and then all of a sudden like in July, I lost my shit.

So how do you find that compassion? Is it just like practice or is it just like we really need to just I find compassion for people for all sorts of shit. I can do it for this.

Right?

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