Those finding success against the infodemic cite several key strategies: “Standing up for your patients and what’s right for health care is not political.” “There is a real concern among physicians about not wanting to alienate their patients by getting quote-unquote political,” says Vineet Arora, MD, a co-founder of a new advocacy group, the Illinois Medical Professionals Action Collaborative Team (IMPACT). Doctors are well-positioned to deliver the truth because of the credibility of the profession - a 2019 Gallup poll ranked nurses and doctors first and third for perceived honesty - and because many of them have earned credibility with patients, neighbors, and family. They say medical professionals have a responsibility to correct misinformation because it impedes efforts to curtail the disease. As an Associated Press headline declared, “Misinformation on coronavirus is proving highly contagious.”įighting the infodemic “is exhausting,” Bloomgarden admits - so much so that in a recent Twitter chat hosted by Doctors on Social Media, one participant wrote, “Sometimes I feel like I’m yelling into a black hole and I feel like I should give up.”ĭo not give up, infodemic combatants say. These are some of the ways that doctors, nurses, and researchers are fighting what’s been dubbed the COVID-19 infodemic - a mix of evolving and conflicting findings, factual errors, rumors, and conspiracy theories, spread lightning-fast through all forms of media, often to promote political agendas rather than public health. She joined several health researchers in running a Facebook project, Dear Pandemic, that provides science-based answers to such queries as, “Can you use a neti pot to prevent coronavirus infection?” and “Is blood plasma a cure?” Lindsey Leininger, PhD, found a way to assuage the confusion of strangers. Most of the time, they will take it down.”

The endocrinologist at Northwestern Medicine in Illinois implores people in her online moms’ groups to remove posts about COVID-19 that are not based on scientific evidence: “I say that it’s feeding fear. He says she’s evolved into “a public health advocate” about containing the virus in her community.Įve Bloomgarden, MD, learned to pick her spots as well by leveraging her role as both a doctor and a mother. Still, Stark finds ways to make a little headway by discussing COVID-19 with people who remain open-minded - such as his mother. For Nicholas Stark, MD, the spread of COVID-19 rumors and misinformation hits home, literally: Although he has labored in the emergency room at UCSF Health in San Francisco to save victims of the disease, many of his relatives and neighbors where he grew up in South Dakota dismiss warnings about the pandemic as “part of a corrupt agenda that is weakening our society.”

Conspire online chat