In January 2022, a minor American television actor named Vachik Mangassarian died of COVID-19 complications. Before his death, he had publicly rejected the vaccine, posting his skepticism on social media to an audience far smaller than the celebrities who dominated pandemic-era health discourse. His story — a public figure, a medical decision publicly announced, a fatal outcome — became one data point in the most extensively documented case of celebrity influence on public health in modern history. The COVID-19 pandemic turned the relationship between entertainment, public figures, and medical decision-making into a global policy problem. It is a problem that has not gone away with the pandemic itself, and it is one that Bangladesh's expanding entertainment industry — with its growing celebrity culture, its rising streaming platforms, and its 60 million social media users — is now embedded in, whether the industry recognises it or not.
The scale of celebrity influence on COVID-19 vaccine attitudes was measured with unusual rigour. Researchers at BMJ Health & Care Informatics analysed nearly 13 million tweets posted between January 2020 and March 2022, using natural language processing to determine the sentiment of each post and compare it with tweets that mentioned specific public figures known for vaccine scepticism. The figures included rapper Nicki Minaj, footballer Aaron Rodgers, tennis player Novak Djokovic, singer Eric Clapton, and several prominent American politicians and media personalities. The study found that the combined vaccine-related tweets from these figures generated 16.32 million likes and that their consistent emotional content about COVID-19 vaccines influenced public opinion and stimulated online discourse in a broadly negative direction. Politicians were among the most influential: the spread of and engagement with posts by political figures indicated what the researchers described as a "strong level of influence," suggesting those in the public eye "play key roles in ensuring population health and should be committed to promoting health-protective behaviours rather than sensational falsehoods."
The Mechanism: Why Celebrity Influence on Health Decisions Works
The question is not simply whether celebrities influence health decisions — the evidence that they do is well-established enough to have predated the pandemic by decades. In the 1950s, Elvis Presley, Dick Van Dyke, and Ella Fitzgerald appearing in television advertisements encouraging polio vaccination measurably boosted national vaccination efforts. A 2013 meta-analysis published in the BMJ found that individuals are conditioned to react positively to celebrity medical advice, and that such advice functions as a "contagion" that diffuses through social networks. The pandemic amplified this mechanism to a scale that earlier eras of celebrity culture could not have achieved, because social media dissolved the previous architecture of gatekeeping between a public figure and their audience.
Dr. Ellen Selkie, an adolescent health researcher at the University of Wisconsin, explained the amplification effect in terms of exposure volume: the repeated encounter with a specific interpretation of a topic — even a false one — increases the likelihood of that interpretation having an effect on belief. "As populations grow to trust the influential nature of celebrity activity on social platforms," the BMJ study noted, "followers are disarmed and open to persuasion when faced with false information, creating opportunities for dissemination and rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation." The fandom relationship between celebrities and their followers adds a layer of trust that institutional public health communication often struggles to replicate: followers are not just passively consuming information but actively identifying with the messenger.
The consequences were measurable at a population level. A November 2023 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that the share of Americans who believed it was safer to get the COVID-19 vaccine than the disease itself had fallen from 75 percent in April 2021 to 63 percent by late 2023 — a decline that tracked with two years of intensive celebrity and political figure anti-vaccine messaging. Vaccination rates among kindergarteners in the US fell from 95 percent to 93 percent between 2019-20 and 2022-23. Measles, eradicated in the US for more than twenty years, saw outbreaks return. These are the downstream effects of an information environment in which celebrity authority on health questions — conferred by fame rather than expertise — competes directly with evidence-based public health communication.
The False Attribution Problem: Celebrity Deaths and Vaccine Conspiracy
The COVID-19 pandemic also demonstrated the inverse of the direct celebrity endorsement effect: the viral attribution of celebrity deaths and illnesses to vaccines, regardless of actual cause. Betty White, Bob Saget, Matthew Perry, and DMX are among the many public figures whose deaths were falsely linked to COVID-19 vaccines by anti-vaccine social media networks. Sports journalist Grant Wahl died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm while covering the 2022 World Cup in Qatar — a documented medical cause — but anti-vaccine accounts immediately connected his death to vaccination, forcing his wife, infectious disease specialist Dr. Céline Gounder, to publicly correct the record while grieving. Athlete Damar Hamlin's dramatic cardiac arrest on an NFL field in January 2023 generated immediate vaccine attribution claims, despite medical consensus that the episode was a classic case of commotio cordis — cardiac arrest triggered by a blow to the chest at a precise moment in the heart rhythm, unrelated to any pharmaceutical cause.
Dr. Joe Pierre, a clinical professor at the University of California San Francisco, characterised the pattern in terms of cognitive bias: "It's like saying 'I had an ice cream cone and then I died the next day; the ice cream must have killed me.'" The psychological mechanism — post hoc ergo propter hoc, the assumption that sequence implies causation — is exploited by misinformation networks that know correlation between a vaccine event and a subsequent medical event is enough to seed doubt, regardless of evidence. PolitiFact designated the broader anti-vaccine movement as its 2023 "Lie of the Year," reflecting the scale of false claims that the platform was still tracking years after vaccines had demonstrably saved millions of lives. Researchers at the University of Southern California and Brown University estimated vaccines saved 2.4 million lives in 141 countries during the first months of the 2021 rollout alone.
Dhallywood, Streaming, and the New Architecture of Celebrity Influence in Bangladesh
Bangladesh's entertainment industry is in the middle of a transformation that is significantly expanding the reach and influence of its public figures. Dhallywood had a record-breaking year in 2024. "Toofan," directed by Raihan Rafi and starring Shakib Khan, became the highest-grossing Bangladeshi film ever, earning over BDT 35 crore domestically and more than BDT 21 crore internationally — with its first-week revenue alone exceeding BDT 20 crore. The film was released in around 20 countries including the US, UK, Australia, and Malaysia. "Rajkumar," another 2024 release, screened in a record 125 theaters across Bangladesh's 210-theater network. These are not just box office statistics — they are measures of audience reach, of the scale of attention that Dhallywood's lead performers can command across national and diaspora audiences simultaneously.
The streaming dimension amplifies this reach further. Bangladesh's OTT landscape is led by Chorki, Bongo BD, Toffee, Hoichoi, and Deepto TV. Chorki, which co-produced "Toofan" with Alpha-i Studios and Indian distributor Shree Venkatesh Films, is serving as both production partner and distribution platform for Dhallywood's biggest titles — a model that gives its platform reach across both theatrical and digital audiences. Hoichoi's parent company SVF Entertainment entered the Bangladesh market in 2023 through collaboration with Alpha-I Studios and Chorki. The theatrical-to-streaming pipeline is normalising, with "Toofan" moving to OTT release on Chorki and Hoichoi after its theatrical run, with bKash as the subscription payment partner. The social media footprint surrounding these releases is enormous: "Toofan's" hit songs "Dushtu Kokil" and "Laage Ura Dhura" generated millions of YouTube views.
Bangladesh's social media user base reached 60 million people in early 2025, having grown by 7.1 million in a single year — a 22.3 percent increase in 2024, with Facebook leading at 52.9 million users. Seventy-seven percent of Bangladesh's internet users engage with at least one social media platform. These numbers mean that statements made by Dhallywood actors, OTT stars, and the growing class of social media content creators in Bangladesh — on any topic, including health — reach audiences at a scale and with a trust level that has no real precedent in Bangladeshi media history. The architecture of influence is now fully in place.
The Responsibility That Scale Creates
The global evidence is unambiguous: celebrity influence on health decisions is real, measurable, and consequential in both directions. When celebrities positively promote health-protective behaviour — vaccination, cancer screening, mental health treatment-seeking — the effects are measurable and beneficial. When they spread misinformation or promote unproven treatments, the effects are also measurable and harmful. The COVID-19 pandemic was, among other things, a large-scale natural experiment in what happens when the information environment around a major public health intervention is contaminated by celebrity authority operating outside its domain of competence.
Bangladesh's entertainment ecosystem is not yet dealing with the specific vaccine misinformation dynamics that dominated Western celebrity culture during the pandemic — the country's vaccine rollout proceeded with relatively less celebrity-driven controversy than the US or UK. But the structural conditions that made celebrity health misinformation possible in those contexts are now present in Bangladesh: a large, fast-growing social media user base, a celebrity culture whose figures command deep audience trust, a streaming ecosystem that dramatically extends the reach of entertainment personalities beyond traditional media, and an information environment where health misinformation — about diet, traditional remedies, mental health, and reproductive health — already circulates widely.
The direction of travel for Bangladesh's entertainment industry — toward higher-budget productions, international distribution, streaming platform expansion, and the kinds of star-making machinery that turn actors into mass cultural figures — increases the stakes of how those figures engage with public health questions. Dhallywood's expanding reach is a genuine cultural achievement, and its growing streaming infrastructure is connecting Bangladeshi storytelling with audiences across the diaspora and beyond. That reach, which is the industry's greatest asset, is also what makes the responsible use of celebrity platform in health contexts a genuinely consequential matter — not a peripheral concern, but a structural feature of what Bangladesh's entertainment industry is becoming.
WinTK covers Bangladesh's entertainment industry, digital media, and public health landscape. For more reporting and analysis, visit our entertainment section.
