Think of the worst moment in your life. Then imagine that moment being taken from you, twisted, and broadcast to strangers as proof of something you know is false. That is what happened to Jenette Torres Odena. Her three-year-old son became ill just days after receiving a shot in a Philippine vaccination drive. The family was plunged into fear, the kind of fear that makes parents pray into the early hours of the morning. But while Odena was waiting for doctors and crying over her son’s hospital bed, the child’s photograph was already traveling across Facebook. Soon it was everywhere. The image was paired with captions claiming that the measles-rubella vaccine had killed him. It appeared in anti-vaccine videos seen by hundreds of thousands of people, each view adding another layer of pain. Medical investigations later found no connection between the boy’s condition and the vaccine. He went on to make a full recovery. But by then the lie had its own life. “I felt like crying,” Odena said. “I kept praying for my son to recover and suddenly they were killing him on Facebook.” There is a particular cruelty in that phrase: not just that her son was sick, but that his sickness was being weaponized. She could not protect her child from the rumors; she could only watch as his face became a symbol for a movement he had nothing to do with. Her story is not simply one family’s nightmare. It is the human face of a public health crisis in the Philippines, where misinformation around vaccination is not an abstract problem but a force that reaches into hospitals, homes and hearts. Every share of her son’s photo was a small act of violence against a mother who was already suffering. Every video that used his image made her recovery more complicated. Her son’s face was no longer just her son’s face; it was a weapon in a war over public health, and no apology from any platform could restore the peace she lost in those terrifying days.
The videos were part of a larger wave of misinformation that accompanied the country’s latest child vaccination campaign. More than seven million Filipinos were inoculated this year, a huge logistical achievement. But roughly 230,000 people refused the vaccine. The Department of Health reported that concern about side effects accounted for 66% of those refusals, and health officials have pointed to social media influencers as a major driver of the fear. This is not a new problem. The Philippines has spent years trying to restore routine childhood immunization rates after a sharp drop in coverage. That decline had real consequences: polio made a comeback in 2019, and measles outbreaks have kept returning. Many parents were already wary because of a botched dengue vaccine rollout about a decade ago, when a vaccine that was supposed to protect children was later linked to risks in some cases. That memory has not faded. Into that soil, pandemic-era conspiracy theories found fertile ground. The claims circulating on social media often recycled narratives that had been spreading globally during Covid-19, but they were adapted to local fears and historical grievances. It is easy to dismiss those who refuse vaccines as simply uninformed, but the reality is more complicated. A mother may have remembered a friend whose child had a bad reaction years ago. She may have read alarming posts that mixed real vaccine ingredients with invented ones. She may have seen videos of children in hospitals, unaware that those children had recovered or that the illness was unrelated. When health authorities say that millions were vaccinated successfully, they speak in statistics. But the people who stay home are not thinking in statistics. They are thinking in images, memories, and stories—especially stories that end badly. And in a country where public trust in institutions has already been strained, the story told by a viral video can feel more persuasive than the reassurances of a government official. The result is a quiet emergency: children left unprotected, nurses facing suspicion, and a health system struggling to be heard above the noise of algorithmic outrage.
Experts say vaccine hesitancy should not be reduced to ignorance. Daniel Fritz Silvallana, a health communication researcher at Deakin University in Australia, put it plainly: “Vaccine hesitancy should not simply be understood as a lack of scientific knowledge among the public.” In the Philippines, he said, “it is also connected to questions of trust, politics, and people’s previous experiences with vaccination and public health institutions.” This is a crucial insight. A father who was treated rudely at a health center may not remember the encounter, but his body does. A mother who lost a child during the dengue vaccine controversy may not understand every scientific detail, but she has learned that institutions can fail. Communities that have been marginalized or ignored may see the government’s vaccination campaign as another form of control rather than care. To overcome this, health communication must go beyond handing out leaflets or correcting false claims. It requires listening. It requires acknowledging that some fears are rooted in real history, even if the current vaccine is safe. It also requires separating the truth from the terrifying image. A child’s fever after vaccination is not the same as a child dying from it, but a frightened parent may not make that distinction in the moment. The anti-vaccine videos exploit that emotional gap. They take rare adverse events, blow them up, and strip away context. They also tap into a broader sense of distrust in authority. When public health officials promise safety, their words are filtered through layers of past disappointment. Silvallana’s analysis suggests that the solution is not simply more science, but more trust-building. That work is slower and harder than a Facebook post. It takes time on the ground, conversations in local languages, and a willingness to understand why people are afraid. It means admitting that public health has not always been perfect in the Philippines, while still urging parents to protect their children against real risks. The challenge is to offer facts without dismissing feelings—and to rebuild a relationship between communities and the institutions that serve them. Until that happens, every well-intentioned vaccination campaign will face the same wall of suspicion.
Within days of Odena’s son photograph being shared online, a Facebook content creator named Maharani Sona Shiloh had turned it into a video. Shiloh presented the image as evidence that the vaccination campaign was harming children. To bolster the claim, she cited Donald Trump’s recent controversial decision to reduce the number of vaccine doses given to American children. The video paired the child’s face with a photograph of the US President and the words: “Everyday slaughter.” It was viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Facebook eventually took down the page after inquiries were made, although the company did not respond to requests for comment. Three affiliated pages remain active. Shiloh rejected any suggestion that she was spreading harmful misinformation, casting herself as a human rights advocate. “People call us crazy,” she said. “Why is it that human beings don’t have the right to challenge these things?” The 44-year-old said she had been involved in anti-vaccine advocacy years before the pandemic. She later connected with church groups and “advocacy circles” that also campaign against SIM card registration and other policies associated with what they call a “New World Order.” This is an important detail because it shows that vaccine misinformation is not always about viruses; it is often part of a larger worldview that sees governments and international organizations as threats. For Shiloh and her followers, the vaccine campaign is not a public health measure but a layer in a conspiracy. That worldview is immune to scientific rebuttal because it is not based on science. It is based on identity and belonging. When a video has millions of views, it creates a community of believers. They reinforce each other’s fears. They celebrate each other’s decision to resist. They see themselves as truth-tellers in a hostile world. The Trump reference is also strategic: it signals to audiences that even the most powerful leader in the world is willing to question vaccines, so why shouldn’t they? None of this means Shiloh is an accidental spreader of misinformation. She is an active producer of it. But her motivation is complex. She genuinely believes she is exposing something horrible. Her content is not just a list of lies; it is a narrative of good versus evil, courage versus conformity. For a parent who already feels powerless, that narrative can be seductive. It offers clarity, control, and a sense of moral superiority. The fact that it endangers children is not persuasive to those who believe they are saving children—children they imagine would be poisoned otherwise.
Shiloh’s videos, some with millions of views, claimed that vaccines contained harmful substances such as “human placenta” and “formalin,” and warned that the World Health Organization was trying to depopulate the planet. These claims collapse quickly under scientific scrutiny. Vaccines do not contain human placenta. Formalin is used in such tiny trace amounts that it is not a danger. But the power of these claims does not come from accuracy; it comes from making familiar ingredients sound sinister. One mother, who asked to speak anonymously to protect her children, said she decided to hold off on vaccinating them after watching Shiloh’s videos. “I watched Ms Maharani’s videos because I was looking for more information. They gave additional knowledge… so it helped me to think more carefully,” she said. A week after the Facebook page was shuttered, she said she was still undecided. She and her husband worried about possible side effects. That is the reality of misinformation: it doesn’t have to be true to be effective. It just has to make doubt feel reasonable. Vaccinologist Helen Petousis-Harris from the University of Auckland observed that these videos rely on fear rather than evidence. “Recognized vaccine ingredients become mysterious contaminants. Rare adverse events become brain damage, epilepsy, organ failure and death,” she said. Her words capture the mechanism at work. A vaccine may contain trace amounts of a preservative; in the video that becomes poison. A child may have a rare seizure after vaccination, even if unrelated; in the video that becomes brain damage. The possibility becomes probability. The probability becomes certainty. For a parent scrolling late at night, the images are visceral: a sick child, a grieving family, a caption warning that this will happen to your child if you follow official advice. The anonymous mother is not a villain or a fool. She is a parent trying to protect her children with the information she has. It just happens that the information she has is profoundly wrong. Her decision to delay vaccination is understandable from the inside, but it leaves her children vulnerable to measles, rubella and other preventable diseases. This is why the fight against misinformation is not just an intellectual exercise. It is a matter of life and death. Yet it cannot be won by simply calling people crazy, as Shiloh said she is called. That only deepens the divide.
For health workers on the frontlines, the effects of these videos are impossible to ignore. Wenna Mae Belen, a rural health worker in Sorsogon province, has seen the fear firsthand. “They get scared because the vlog said vaccines are fatal,” she said. Some conversations have become hostile. “They tell me if something bad happens, they’ll make me suck the vaccines out of their kids’ bodies.” Imagine going to work to protect children and being threatened by the very parents you are trying to help. Belen is only 25, but she has already learned that Facebook bears “major responsibility” for the spread of vaccine misinformation. She also knows that fighting with content creators and their followers is a losing battle. The more you argue, the more you confirm their suspicion. The more you attack them, the more you prove that the “New World Order” is against them. Belen calls for a different approach: open, non-judgmental conversations with parents. “It isn’t enough for us to just say: ‘We’re the experts, so trust us,’” she said. That is perhaps the most important message in this whole story. The scientists are right; the vaccines are safe; the campaign is necessary. But facts alone will not restore trust. Trust is rebuilt through relationships, one conversation at a time. It means sitting with a skeptical mother and listening to her fears before showing her the evidence. It means acknowledging that public health institutions have made mistakes in the past. It means recognizing that a parent’s refusal to vaccinate is often an act of love, however misguided. Odena’s son recovered. The anonymous mother remains undecided. Shiloh’s videos continue to circulate on affiliated pages. The battle is far from over. But there is a path forward. It goes through the health center, not the algorithm. It is slow, difficult, and human. If the Philippines can find a way to rebuild trust, it will not just raise immunization rates—it will show that empathy can be stronger than fear. Until then, the work continues, one child at a time, one parent at a time, one honest conversation at a time.