UPenn researchers developing taxpayer-funded AI tool to target vaccine skeptics in social media

09/06/2024 / By Ava Grace

University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) researchers are using U.S. taxpayer dollars to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to target social media users who are posting negative things about the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.

This information came from grant documents obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is funding this $4 million effort through the National Cancer Institute. (Related: HHS deploys AI robots to “inoculate” social media users against HPV vaccine “misinformation.”)

Associate Professor of Nursing at UPenn Melanie L. Kornides heads the team behind the study. Kornides “specializes” in researching vaccine uptake and anti-misinformation strategies, while others participating in this project are software developers, machine learning and communication experts, and social media analysts.

Their task is to scour YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for user data and create an “inoculation tool” to pinpoint “HPV vaccine misinformation” as well as content expressing vaccine skepticism – “whether or not the information in the post is true or false.”

Mary Holland, co-author of “The HPV Vaccine on Trial: Seeking Justice for a Generation Betrayed,” told the Defender that the UPenn research on the part of the public health industry is “a sign of weakness.”

“When you are censoring information, labeling it misinformation and smearing us, this is a sign that they’ve lost the science and are now in a verbal food fight. It’s just a sign they are going to lose,” she said.

Parents are likely to refuse HPV vaccination for their children

The grant is one of more than 50 grants totaling more than $40 million awarded by the HHS last year to universities, healthcare systems and departments of public health to increase HPV vaccine uptake.

Nearly half of parents have heard stories of harm from HPV vaccination, according to the grant documents, and those parents are more likely to refuse vaccination for their children.

“Fueled by misinformation from the anti-vaccine movement through social media, parents’ concerns about side effects and safety may foster reluctance to vaccinate their children,” the documents said.

In response, the researchers said they are training AI to identify misinformation using methods from Kornides’ previous work identifying HPV vaccine misinformation on X, formerly Twitter. In that study, Kornides and colleagues identified tweets about the HPV vaccine using keywords and coded them for their misinformation content.

Overall, tweets that were deemed “misinformation” raised the following concerns: the vaccine was ineffective, unsafe or caused serious adverse events; there was inadequate or falsified safety monitoring; the pharmaceutical industry was profiteering; the government conspired with interested actors to support their profiting; children were too young for the vaccine; mandates were unjust; and there were issues with vaccines in general.

“This just proves yet again that anything that deviates from the orthodoxy in public health is considered misinformation,” Holland said. “Truth is irrelevant. That’s shocking and disturbing. And it can kill you, period. That’s the bottom line.”

Merck, the company that makes the Gardasil vaccine, is facing over 200 lawsuits in federal court from people who suffered a range of serious injuries after taking Gardasil, including autoimmune disorders, premature ovarian failure and cancer. There are also over 200 Gardasil injury claims pending in the Vaccine Court.

Visit VaccineInjuryNews.com for similar stories.

Watch as Dr. Judy Mikovits discusses data she presented to the vaccine court about children getting advanced cancers from the Gardasil shot.

This video is from the channel The Real Dr Judy on Brighteon.com.