Nearly 300,000 people worldwide have died in the current COVID-19 pandemic, and over 80,000 of them come from the United States. To reduce the infection rate and "flatten the curve", health officials and scientists around the world are working around the clock to better understand the new virus and disseminate this information to the public. Despite these efforts, disinformation about SARS-CoV-2 continues to circulate on the Internet. But this is not the first pandemic in the world, nor the first time that false information about a major public health crisis has spread on the Web. However, lessons from these past events, such as the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic and past influenza outbreaks, on how to effectively dispel false information and communicate scientific facts to the public are not applied. This failure, experts say, costs lives.
During the 2009-2010 H1N1 flu pandemic, the federal government was praise for the steps you have taken to deal with false information about the disease and the vaccine. Theoretically, the effective strategies they used could help the current administration and other government agencies to refine their responses, says George Dehner, a disease historian at University of the United States. Wichita state studying flu. But, he says, "the current answer does not seem to be based on what we have learned from these challenges."
During the pandemic from 2009 to 2010, the Centers for Disease Control held daily press conferences where journalists had the opportunity to ask many questions. Subsequently, the recordings were put online for free, so that anyone could view them. "I'm struggling to find a better system than asking scientific experts to deal with press questions for a long time and make them available to others," says Dehner.
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Sandra Crouse Quinn, professor of public health at the University of Maryland, agrees. The most effective way to combat false information, he says, is to communicate the facts clearly at every opportunity. This does not only mean at press conferences – it also means relevant social media posts, where false information is spreading faster than ever, and engaging with local community groups to help people Educate each other and build trust.
While the CDC held daily press conferences at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency has not hosted such an event since March 9. The public face of the federal response to the pandemic since then has been the White House Coronavirus Task Force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence. As Popular science reported earlier this week, task force experts often disagree with the politicians who lead it and must correct false information from President Trump and others during daily task force briefings. employment.
The CDC's ability and freedom to communicate directly with the media and the public has been greatly reduced, says Quinn. "We are in an anti-scientific environment (with) an administration which does not trust the opinions of experts," she said.
In addition, he says, the popularity and use of social media has skyrocketed since 2010, providing an unprecedented platform for inaccuracies on everything from the cause of the virus to the goal and to the effectiveness of a future vaccine. Quinn says that much of this information is leaked by people with hidden political and financial motivations. She says that false information will only become a more serious problem if a COVID-19 vaccine is found, since disinformation of the vaccine is already rampant.
Quinn and his colleagues are studying false information about vaccines. In the course of their work, they asked the Americans about their response to an action by President Obama during the development of the H1N1 flu vaccine: they publicly shared that he and first lady Michelle Obama had been vaccinated and that their two girls had also been vaccinated. they had been vaccinated.
"We asked questions about it and guess what, regardless of political affiliation, has made a (positive) difference in people's willingness to immunize their children," says Quinn.
Investing in local solutions and getting ahead of vaccine misinformation could go a long way, she said. But in the absence of clear federal leadership that gives the CDC and other organizations the space and mandate to work, that seems questionable, says Quinn. "It is terrifying that we find ourselves in a situation where the federal government has failed so much," he said.