Adrià Voltà
In May 2014, in El Carmen de Bolívar in northern Colombia, mainstream news and social media were awash with reports and viral videos of adolescent girls experiencing symptoms of a “mystery illness“, including fainting and numbness. Claims were made that this was linked to side effects from the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine.
Although Colombian health authorities’ investigations found no evidence of a biological link between the vaccine and the symptoms reported, the effects of these claims, which had been spread via social media, lingered. By 2016, Colombia’s female HPV vaccination rate, in 2012 one of the world’s…
