The Potential Use of Melodrama to Dispel the Antivaccine Movement

Melodrama in sensational news has been prominent since the early twentieth century.
Singer details its rise to popularity due to urbanization and modernity. He expounds upon
melodramas inherent moral dichotomy, in which there are no in-betweens, only good and evil.
Many scholars such as Landy, Cox, and Williams have reiterated melodrama as a powerful tool
to spread ideologies. Collins and Kemper ramify this idea by extending the use of melodrama to
spreading social movements. The criteria of a social movement and the importance of group
mentality is detailed in Collins essay, The focus of attention becomes a mutual focus of
attention. Each participant becomes aware of each others awareness, and thus of each ones
unity at this moment with each other (Collins 28). A connection between members of a social
movement strengthens both the groups resolve as well as the individuals faith in the
movements beliefs. Key to achieving successful group mentality is, unsurprisingly,
melodramatic representation in which members experience moral injustice through the
victimization of helpless parties. This process is exemplified in Griffiths famous Birth of a
Nation, specifically through the use of the family and female victimization. Elsaesser notes how
much inserting ideological conflicts into family situations can amplify the effects of melodramatic
tactics. The characteristics of a social movement that Collins listed is depicted in the hero of the
film, the KKK, who become morally enraged at the mistreatment of family and females and
together, defeat the evil of free blacks with a power formed by their collective outrage. The solid
formation of the group in the film is signified by, as Collins refers to it, the creation of group
symbols, which isolates a memory of collective participation (Collins 28). For the KKK, these
symbols are the white cloaks and masks that serve as their uniform. Just as Griffth used
melodramatic techniques to evoke sympathies in his audience towards his ideology, many
social movements today employ melodrama as a means of promotion and recruitment. One
such example is the antivaccine movement that emerged with the microbiological revolution.
The antivaccine lobby mainly consists of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.
The Encyclopedia of Bioethics recognizes that such parents usually possess different
philosophical beliefs or are simply misinformed, While some parents may object to
immunization on religious or philosophical grounds, others may believe that immunization poses
a risk to their children that is not justified by its benefits (Diekema). The Encyclopedia also,
however, recognizes the success of vaccines and how important they are to reducing childhood
preventable diseases. Gaudinos study from 2006 reveals that within this population of
antivaccine parents, over half of them are generally mistrusting of doctors as well as
misinformed regarding the risks and benefits of vaccines (many parents think that they are high
risk, low benefit and thus refuse to vaccinate their children). Such inventions by the movement
that corrupt the viewpoints of parents are debunked by Mats and Goldshtein in their Russian
journal and by Clift and Rizzolo in their article published in JAAPA. Frenkel and Nielsen attribute
this misinformation to misguided mass media, stating that together with other forces inhibits
the positive effects of vaccines towards creating a disease-free environment. Mats and
Goldshtein counter two specific misconceptions: vaccines supposed harmful effects and
toxicity.
Already repercussions can be seen in the public in which the population of unvaccinated
kids are endangering those around them. As the Encyclopedia points out, there are multiple
ways that this could happen, First, immunized individuals are harmed by the cost of medical
care for those who choose not to immunize their children and whose children then contract
preventable disease (Diekema). In addition to economical harm, one infected child can easily
and quickly infect other unimmunized children, as they are usually small in number. Even the
benefit of herd immunity that comes with mass immunization will not completely negate this
possibility. It is a matter of public health to stop this movement from spreading misconceptions
about vaccination. As discussed before, there are many scientific sources that discredit the
movement, yet it is not a well promoted issue and many people are not even aware of why it
could be a problem. There must be a change in how the dangers of the antivaccine is conveyed
to the public, and melodramatic techniques can be a useful tool in doing so.
Melodrama is a subtle but powerful force of sensational news publishing, and in the
modern age it is more powerful and faster due to advancements in technology. It has been used
in multiple instances of media coverage, many of which will be discussed later in this paper.
Parallel to antivaccine issues, melodrama has been successfully employed to promote the
importance of the fight against antibiotic resistance. There are multiple avenues available to
harness the power of melodrama to quell the antivaccine movement before it grows into a
dangerously influential factor of todays public health.
Our mistake with medical advances is that we have conditioned the public into accepting
the resources they have without understanding fully what the effects of long term use, and so a
lack of questioning the authority behind the information they receive results. This was
particularly true for the antibiotics revolution when it first began in the late twentieth century. For
example, a commercial from 1988 for the antibiotic cream Campo-Phenique uses melodrama in
the way that Fox News uses it to promote 9/11, as detailed in Elisabeth Ankers essay, Villains,
Victims, and Heroes: Melodrama Media, and September 11. This short commercial casts
children as the victim--emphasized by repeating loops of young children crying after hurting
themselves--rogue microbes as the villain, and painless antibiotics as the hero. Though short,
this melodramatic plot instills sympathy in the audience for the victim and makes them resent
the villain, thus preventing any questioning of the products credibility. Such a promotion would
have been even more successful in the 1980s, when the manufacturing of a product to fight
against bacterial infection was still new and seemed like a miracle cure as it eradicated
diseases that were previously untreatable (ie. tuberculosis, strep throat, etc). This habit
ignorance fostered in the eighties to hinder the twenty-first century generation in the form of the
antivaccine movement. The reason that this group has grown is because parents who care
deeply for their children immediately villainize any possible factor that may harm them--such as
vaccines. Authority in this field--namely, doctors--become villains who are out to get their
children using painful needles and sample of disease. They are misinformed in a manner that
antagonizes the only ones who can dispel their ignorance, an ignorance propagated by the
unconditional acceptance of medical advances in the past.
The issues of antibiotic resistance and antivaccine movement parallel in many ways.
First and foremost, they can both be traced back to the misinformed public. Antibiotic
resistance is a major twenty-first century issue because of the nature of past promotion like
the 1988 commercial. Because of such media, the public--and even health professionals to
an extent--became convinced that antibiotics were a miracle cure that could work for any
illness. They were used freely and in excess, incorporated into cleansing products like soap
and household cleaners as well as creams and lotions. This eliminated weak strains of
bacteria until only resistant microbes--species that our antibiotics have no effect on--were left
behind. We are now faced with a serious problem in which supposedly eradicated diseases
are resurfacing in forms that we have no cure for. The World Health Organization (WHO)
states the danger of this development bluntly, It is an increasingly serious threat to global
public health that requires action across all government sectors and society. This statement
alone employs melodrama in that it victimizes global public health and initiates a call to
action for governments and organization to stand up and fill the role of the hero who will
defeat the microbial villain and reinstall public health safety.
Examples of media coverage of antibiotic resistance can be found in Frontlines
documentary, Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria. It dubs resistant bacteria with a new name,
the superbug, a term later repeated by CNN media coverage. The documentary tracks three
cases of untreatable infections. The first two cases both focus on young people who are
tragically targeted by this nightmare bacteria. The documentary launches with the story of
young girl, Addie Rerecich, who was just physically perfect, beautiful from head to toe [...]
before she got sick, as her mother told the Frontline interviewer. The documentary
emphasizes how quickly this lively, innocent girl fell ill to an infection caused by a resistant
staph bacteria strain, punctuating her inevitable hospitalization with her mother wondering,
How did she get so sick? How did this happen so fast? This story casts Addie as the
innocent victim and the vicious MRSA infection, silent and quick, along with the secondary
infection stenotrophomonas that Addie got after she was put on lung bypass machine, as the
villains. The stenotrophomonas bacteria is perceived as a particularly persistent villain, as it
came back to ail Addie again and again as doctors put her on almost every antibiotic they
could think of, only to discover that stenotrophomonas was pan-resistant, or resistant to all
antibiotics. The segment cuts off at this moment, in which Addie seems to be hopelessly
fighting for her life. Her fate is revealed at the end of the documentary: she was discharged
but struggles with great difficulty each day. Addie herself is shown giving her account of her
months of hospitalization, occasionally crying at the uncertainty and fear of the memories.
This is designed to strike a strong chord of empathy within the audience for the innocent
victim.
The second story is one of a young man named David Ricci, whose leg was run over
by a train and subsequently infected by a superbug that was currently wreaking havoc in
India. They way this superbug--NDM-1--is described is crucial to the melodramatic effect of
this segment. The superbug is personified in the explanation provided by the narrator, First
from a scientific standpoint, we didnt realize that this [the spread of resistance] could be
done quite so easily. It meant that in places where water and sanitation was poor, where
there was going to be lots of bacteria sitting next to each other, that you could have very
rapid spread of resistance information across unrelated bacteria just out there in the
environment, which is a hugely greater risk than if it were only to happen within the bodies of
patients who had these infections. It is not the first time that the evolutionary struggle
between microbes and antibiotics have been likened to a war, and that fact is utilized here in
characterizing bacteria as the enemy. Furthermore, the superbug is pictured specifically
attacking the perfect virtuous victim; David was a bright young man who was in India for a
missions trip. The reason his leg was run over by a train was because he was in the slums
of the slums to help build an orphanage for poor children. Such a scenario further
strengthens the melodramatic rhetoric of the documentary.
While the first two cases of the documentary focus on bright young individuals whose
lives were irreversibly changed due to resistant bacteria, Frontlines last story documents the
process in which one of the nations most prestigious hospitals succumbs to another
superbug, KPC. Here the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health is pictured as the
virtuous victim, simply trying to treat a patient unknowingly carrying KPC. Frontline portrays
this bacterial strain as one that is sneaky as well as lethal; much of the segment revolves
around how the doctors could not figure out how their patients were getting infected as they
were taking extreme caution to isolate all infected patients, We immediately went on high
alert, the equivalent of hospital epidemiology DEFCON 5, trying to implement as many things
as we could think of at the time to prevent any further spread of the organism in the hospital.
In this case the victim is also portrayed as the hero; the hospital staff works relentlessly to
isolate the infected and prevent further spread of the infection. The outbreak subsided
abruptly, but the staff are still determined to remain vigilant. Julie Segre tells Frontline, One
of the reasons that really brought me into this field is that I asked the director of clinical
microbiology, What do you do, you know, when you isolate one of these bacteria and you
see that it is resistant to all known antibiotics? I said, Well, what do you do then? And he
said, I pray. As the last example presented by the documentary, this story serves as an
action initiation for the public to become more aware of antibiotic resistance and for health
organizations and governments to become increasingly alert of the growing presence of the
superbug in todays world.
There was definite success in the melodramatic promotion of antibiotic resistance as
an evil that must be defeated. Evidence of this can be found in the emergence of what the
media calls the anti antibiotics movement. The news, which caters towards the general
public, has become more informative about how antibiotic resistance can affect anyone, just
like Frontlines documentary stressed that many of the victims of superbugs were perfectly
healthy prior to infection. The antivaccine movement poses a threat to public health in a
similar manner as ignorance of antibiotic resistance; it makes us vulnerable because there
are obvious holes within the mostly vaccinated population. Yet the WHO is strangely hesitant
in stating how much the antivaccine movement is preventing us from reinforcing those holes,
How one addresses the antivaccine movement has been a problem since the time of
Jenner. The best way in the long term is to refute wrong allegations at the earliest
opportunity by providing scientifically valid data. This is easier said than done, because the
adversary in this game plays according to rules that are not generally those of science
(Andre). This is not enough to prevent the development of vaccine misconceptions, but
melodrama, in place of the rules of science, can be used in a similar manner as it is in the
promotion of antibiotic resistance. In specific cases, unvaccinated children can be portrayed
as the victim while their parents are the unfortunate villains who mean well but are hindered
by their ignorance. Finally, a call to action similar to the one posed at the end of Hunting the
Nightmare Bacteria can enlist health organizations and governments as the heroes to beat
this misinformed movement. The antivaccine force has not yet fully matured as a social
movement; it lacks some of the characteristics that Collins listed in his essay in Passionate
Politics (for example, it does not have an group emblem), so there is still time to eliminate
this potentially dangerous factor, but this does not mean that we can be slow to act as the
movement is growing influential every day. Melodrama, normally coupled with a negative
connotation in both general use and rhetorical discussion, can be utilized to help raise
awareness and eradicate ignorance in much of the same way that humankind must fight to
eradicate the diseases that threaten them.

































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