In recent years, disinformation has seemingly become relentlessly rampant in scientific and medical settings.
Prominent politicians ranging from former presidents have touted useless drugs as treatments for COVID-19. Partisan attacks on the safety and effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines have expanded to attacks on all vaccines. Established scientific and medical authorities are being vilified and even physically assaulted on social media and the airwaves.
The sheer amount of lies and disinformation injected into mainstream politics has left some scientists despairing of ever gaining public attention again.
“Scientists really know this is a problem because they see it in the community and read about it on the news,” said Tara Kirk Sell of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “They recognize the problems they have with misinformation and disinformation in public health, in the medical field, and in other areas. They want to find ways to address it. We are providing guidance to help fight it and make people healthier.” ”
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Sell was referring to her center’s just-released “Practical Playbook for Combating Health Misinformation.” This 65-page publication represents a roadmap for identifying misinformation and disinformation and applying the best strategies to counter it before it spreads.
It’s part of a new genre of advice for scientists, public health officials and others faced with rumors and deliberate lies that impede research. The latter is “disinformation,” as opposed to “misinformation,” which may simply be a widely accepted misconception that may have an innocuous source.
UNICEF, the Yale Institute for Global Health, and other organizations published one of the earliest such guides in late 2020, specifically targeting anti-vaccine misinformation. Others have a broader goal of combating conspiracy theories in general.
One recommendation that seems to be universal in most cases is to take a strategic approach. Disinformation campaigns cannot be defeated with ad hoc measures. We need a systematic, proactive and targeted approach from trusted science advocates.
This work is important because disinformation has more than political consequences. It will cost your life. Pseudoscience debunker Peter Hotez estimates that up to 200,000 Americans may have died from the coronavirus after the vaccine was introduced because anti-vaccine propaganda deterred them from getting vaccinated. .
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Measles cases that were supposed to have been eradicated in the United States several years ago are resurging due to misinformation about vaccines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has counted more than 20 measles cases in at least 11 states so far this year. This is about a third of the 58 cases recorded in all of last year, counted in the first six weeks of 2024 alone, and a more severe outbreak could be imminent. It suggests that.
Six cases occurred at a single school in Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has made anti-vaccine propaganda a central part of his public health policy. The school’s measles vaccination rate is about 89%, well below the 95% level considered to achieve herd immunity, which protects unvaccinated people.
Scientists are aware of the problems they have with misinformation and disinformation in public health, medicine, and other fields. They want to find a way to deal with it.
Tara Kirk Sell, Johns Hopkins University
As we have previously reported, the politicization of the coronavirus response has intensified medical disinformation more generally. Part of the reason may be that the pandemic has brought public health efforts out of the shadows.
“Public health has often been an invisible force for good,” Sell told me. “People don’t really notice it because they don’t realize they don’t get sick or they don’t get food poisoning.” But during the pandemic, “people are seeing public health working in a more visible way.” “I realized that public health measures can sometimes be restrictive, and at times I’m a little scared.”
Sell acknowledges that fighting disinformation is becoming increasingly difficult. One of the reasons he does that is that a lot of it comes from government sources.
That’s a new problem. One of the questions that came up during a simulation exercise on pandemic response hosted by Sell’s institute for businesses and public health officials in October 2019 was: “What if misinformation or disinformation comes from the government? What will happen?”
The conclusion was, “That’s a strange question,” Sell said. “Right now, it doesn’t seem that crazy. We’ve seen it a lot.”
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For example, in a House hearing just last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) criticized misleading statistics presented out of context, unverified claims about side effects, and the novel coronavirus. The attack on the coronavirus vaccine consisted of flagrant misstatements about its effects. infection.
As I reported, one of the companies most fervently distributing anti-vaccine claptrap in the country is doing it from an official perch. He is Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who was appointed to the post by DeSantis, and who may be the nation’s second most dangerous public criminal against decency and sound public health policy. be.
Radapo approach During the Florida measles outbreak, the CDC downplayed the need to vaccinate children and allowed parents to independently decide whether to send unvaccinated children to schools experiencing outbreaks. This is contrary to the recommendations of The CDC has placed vaccination at the top of its recommendations for preventing the disease, and recommends that people who can transmit the virus be isolated.
The problem of prolonged anti-disinformation campaigning is contained in Brandolini’s Law, coined in 2013 by Italian software engineer Alberto Brandolini. When summarized, it is written as “the amount of energy required to refute”. [B.S.] teeth an order of magnitude larger than the amount needed to produce it. ”
In other words, the sellers of disinformation only need to make claims that sound plausible, or that may even have some kernel of truth to influence the unwary. Debunking or refuting their claims often requires providing nuanced or technical information that doesn’t have the same appeal.
Recognizing the techniques of disinformation and how they plant sticky but false notions in lay minds offers some useful rules of engagement, Sell says. One is the value of “addressing or refuting potential misinformation before it is widely disseminated,” as the Johns Hopkins University handbook puts it.
“People aren’t that creative,” she says. “They use the same stories over and over again about different health threats. No matter what the vaccine is, vaccination campaigns are filled with rumors of infertility and whether the vaccine is being tested on children. You can predict that rumors will spread.This is effective because it resonates with the target audience, such as pregnant women and parents of small children.
“We need to show people how to recognize emotionally charged disinformation tactics and personal stories of adverse side effects that are claimed to be representative of patients as a whole rather than rare events.”
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It may also help highlight the motivations of anti-science propagandists who spread disinformation “often for social, political, or economic gain.” In fact, as The Washington Post recently documented in tax records, four nonprofits that sold medical misinformation during the pandemic saw donations jump by more than $100 million from 2020 to 2022.
This includes Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which is currently trying to take its anti-vaccine campaign to the Oval Office.
Lessons from the pandemic may help the public health community avoid some of the mistakes that have allowed it to undermine public trust in scientists and medical professionals, a key component of the disinformation lobby. . The CDC and other public health agencies have occasionally changed their recommendations regarding coronavirus response policies.
This was not an unexpected event, as initially little was known about the virus, its effects, or optimal treatment. But it gave opponents the opportunity they needed to question the seriousness of the outbreak, the policy recommendations themselves, and promote unnecessary snubs.
“Public health needs to be transparent about why advice changes,” Mr Sell said, explaining that “if we don’t make changes based on new evidence, we are doing the public a disservice.” “Maybe we didn’t do a good thing.” “We’re going to learn more during this pandemic and our advice is subject to change.” That’s a good enough job, and if that advice changes, we’ll do our best to keep you as informed as possible.”
Sell acknowledges that the challenge of fighting a science-based fire hose of lies has made some scientists cynical about the prospects of victory. “The playbook is not a silver bullet,” she says. “But it helps. There is work to be done, but we cannot give up. Attacking misinformation in as many different ways as possible is what we have to do.”
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
