This is tricky because of the evidence that even myth-busting vaccine misinformation runs the risk of making readers more likely to believe the misinformation and also less inclined to vaccinate. That may be because people are more likely to believe statements that they’ve heard repeatedly — so the more exposure they have to misinformation, the more likely they are to believe it to be true, even if they have been explicitly told that it’s false.

One place to start: Treat the topic with the seriousness it deserves. Media organizations should devote seasoned health reporters to the case, rather than covering it as celebrity gossip. And then from there, instead of focusing entirely on the news of a celebrity saying something unfounded (and repeating that unfounded claim in the headline or news crawl), a more informative, less harmful approach would be to cover that celebrity’s perspective as one data point in a broader article, perhaps about the trend of vaccine hesitancy or what’s behind the law that this celebrity is opposing. Think of it as misinformation harm reduction.

Even the views of people who are “vaccine hesitant” — not completely anti-vaccine but skeptical about whether vaccines are safe enough or worth it — are frequently rooted in unsupported anti-vaccine talking points. The media, in misunderstanding this dynamic, often gives an uncritical platform to those ideas, potentially fueling greater vaccine hesitancy among the public in the process.

For example, after she received criticism for her lobbying efforts, Ms. Biel clarified her stance on Instagram, writing, “I am not against vaccinations.” Her reason for opposing the bill: “My dearest friends have a child with a medical condition that warrants an exemption from vaccinations, and should this bill pass, it would greatly affect their family’s ability to care for their child in this state.”

“Entertainment Tonight” ran a segment covering Ms. Biel’s response to the backlash. And why not? Her argument sounds reasonable enough: In a limited set of cases, there are legitimate medical reasons not to vaccinate.

But the problem here is that the bill is significantly more complicated than Ms. Biel’s framing of it, and deserved a deeper dive than “Entertainment Tonight” gave it. The back story is that public health experts and lawmakers are worried that doctors are giving kids medical exemptions when they aren’t warranted, which threatens (and even eliminates) herd immunity in some communities.

The goal of the California bill is to cut back on these unnecessary medical exemptions by standardizing the exemption request process rather than leaving the call up to individual doctors. People with legitimate medical reasons to avoid vaccinating would still be allowed to opt out.

See? Complicated. Probably far too complicated to cover all that ground in a minute-long entertainment news segment. The media has a duty to get this right, and not cause further confusion or skepticism. It is a matter of public health.

Carolyn Kylstra is editor in chief of Self Magazine.

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