In early October 2021, a mob of several hundred people attacked nurses providing COVID-19 vaccinations and held them hostage. Though details are sparse, the incident happened in the rural Guatemalan village of Maguilá in Alta Verapaz province near Quetzaltenango. One vehicle was rendered inoperable through vandalism, and a cooler used to keep the vaccines effective in the tropical heat was destroyed, resulting in the loss of about fifty doses. A BBC News article quoted a nurse as saying, “We tried to explain a number of times that vaccination is voluntary and that we did not want to force anyone, yet they didn’t let us [work].” The team was released after about seven hours of negotiations with police.
Gabriel Sandoval, director of the provincial health department, noted that vaccination reluctance isn’t new, but this was an escalation from the typical latent hesitancy: “Other communities have refused, but what they usually do is draw up papers saying we went to offer to vaccinate them, and they take responsibility for refusing it,” he was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. Sandoval added that because of the misinformation about vaccines and distrust of doctors in the region—and on social media specifically—“This was bound to happen.” President Alejandro Giammattei responded to the incident by asking Guatemalans to support and respect public health officials. Only about one in four eligible Guatemalans have been fully vaccinated, very low even by Latin American standards, where the pandemic has put added pressure on an already weak public health infrastructure.
Distrust of authorities—and North American medical authorities in particular—is nothing new. In 2013, gunmen attacked two medical clinics, killing nine polio immunization workers in northern Nigeria. Dozens of polio vaccination workers in Pakistan have been attacked and murdered over the past decade. Much of the violence there has been targeted by the Taliban at health workers because conspiracy theories, urban legends, and rumors have spread throughout the region.
The Guatemalan protest was spurred by a local villager who had developed side effects from the COVID-19 vaccination, which are expected, temporary, and mild. And it’s happened before. In a small town in rural Colombia, teen girls complained about strange symptoms in 2014. Though no official cause was determined, villagers placed the blame squarely on a vaccination campaign. According to Latin America–based Telesurv, “At least 276 girls have been reported sick in the Caribbean coastal town, after receiving the Gardasil vaccine in the last several months. The girls, ranging from nine to sixteen, all experienced the similar symptoms including dizziness, fainting, headaches, numbness and tingling throughout their bodies.”
It’s not hard to understand why the HPV vaccine was blamed. For one thing, the vaccination was a common factor among the victims, who were all school-aged females. It’s a classic example of a logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”). People tend to assume that if one event follows another event, there must be some causal link between the two: The girls began having strange symptoms after they got the vaccine, and therefore the vaccine caused the symptoms. But that’s not necessarily true; there could have been any number of other factors.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wasted no time in playing up the Colombian story, along with other examples, including a 2008 case where homeless people in Poland may have died from bird flu vaccinations. Never mind that these were completely different vaccines given to different populations on different continents six years apart—and that the symptoms were completely different: “This week I saw vaccine deaths in Pakistan, in Syria, and now in Colombia. … They say, ‘We take the shots, and the little girls start dying,’” Jones stated in a September 20 video. Jones was apparently unaware that the girls were vaccinated nearly half a year earlier and that the ailments (dizziness, headaches, numbness, etc.) fell somewhat short of “dying.”
Because the HPV vaccination cannot cause the symptoms described (and certainly not months after being administered) and no other agents or toxins were found, the most likely cause is mass sociogenic illness, better known as mass hysteria. It happens when psychological symptoms are converted into physical conditions. The girls were neither faking nor imagining the physical symptoms; they really did experience headaches, nausea, occasional fainting, and so on. But the problems were not caused by any external substance or contaminant; the cause was social and psychological. Parents of the Colombian girls angrily (and understandably) rejected the diagnosis, instead accusing the local authorities of incompetence or even conspiracy. Public health officials feared that if others accepted the HPV vaccine explanation, parents would refuse to vaccinate their children. Ironically, rumors and conspiracy theories blaming vaccines cause far more lasting damage than the vaccines themselves.