Who are the most dangerous purveyors of COVID misinformation?
This spring, the Center for Countering Digital Hate published "The Disinformation Dozen" - a report on the 12 influencers it claimed were responsible for 65% of anti-vaccine falsehoods disseminated on Facebook and other social media platforms. Top of the list is Florida osteopath Joseph Mercola. Other disinformers include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmental activist, and Rizza Islam, a Nation of Islam acolyte.
The misinformation they peddle is ugly stuff, a danger to those who believe it as well as a public hazard to those they expose to their irresponsible choices. It's also a reminder today's anti-vaxxers aren't merely a right-wing phenomenon, much as some of the media have tried to paint it. Most figures on the list come from the woo-woo world of alternative medicine, not usually associated with Republicanism.
But the story of fake cures and political conspiracy theories isn't the only COVID misinformation. Distrust in public health messaging is also sown when public health messengers show themselves to be less than completely trustworthy.
The latest in this drama was a July 20 screaming match between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul. Paul, R-Ky., suggested Fauci had lied to Congress in claiming the National Institutes of Health had never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci took exception, saying the research that the NIH had funded indirectly with a $600,000 grant wasn't connected to the COVID virus and didn't qualify as gain-of-function, a research technique in which a pathogen is made more transmissible.
The larger truth - obscured until recently by efforts (including by Fauci) to dismiss the lab-leak theory for the origins of the pandemic - is that the U.S. government's scientific establishment did support gain-of-function research that deserved far more public debate than it got. Also that beneficiaries of that funding engaged in deceptive tactics and mendacity to shield their research from public scrutiny while denouncing their critics as conspiracymongers.
If millions feel some public health experts are not as honest as the media make them out to be, there's a good reason.
What goes for questions about the pandemic origins goes also for questions about its handling. The CDC vastly overstated the risks of outdoor spread of the virus, which (at least until the emergence of the delta variant) appears to be closer to 0.1% than as high as 10%. Fauci lied - there's no other word for it - about what he saw as the threshold figure for reaching herd immunity, based, as Donald McNeil reported in The Times in December, on "his gut feeling ."
An alarming CDC study found Hispanic and Black children were at greater risk of being hospitalized for COVID, which contributed to the pressure to keep public schools closed to in-person teaching despite evidence that schools weren't viral hot zones.
The impact of this misinformation has probably done more to undermine public confidence in establishment science than a Florida quack. The credibility of public- health experts depends on informing the public the whole truth, uncertainties included, rather than whatever they think the public needs to hear.
These same experts could further diminish their credibility if their assurances about vaccine efficacy prove overly fervent. A preliminary Israeli study suggests the Pfizer shot loses much of its ability to protect against infection after a few months, though it continues to protect against severe disease. That's a step down from previous promises. If we end up needing a third, fourth or fifth shot - and if serious conditions wind up linked to the vaccines - the erosion of public trust could turn into a landslide.
So let's continue to expose and denounce misinformation coming from the fever swamps of Alternative America. But it won't do sufficient good until the guardians of public health hold themselves to a higher standard of truthfulness and accountability. Physician, heal thyself.
The New York Times