Coronavirus Doctors Battle Another Scourge: Misinformation

Doctors on the front lines of the global pandemic say they are fighting not just the coronavirus, but also increasingly combating a never-ending scourge of misinformation about the disease that is hurting patients.

Before the pandemic, medical professionals had grown accustomed to dealing with patients misled by online information, a phenomenon they called Dr. Google. But in interviews, more than a dozen doctors and misinformation researchers in the United States and Europe said the volume related to the virus was like nothing they had seen before. They blamed leaders like President Trump for amplifying fringe theories, the social media platforms for not doing enough to stamp out false information and individuals for being too quick to believe what they see online.

Last week, researchers said that at least 800 people worldwide died in the first three months of the year, and thousands more were hospitalized, from unfounded claims online that ingesting highly concentrated alcohol would kill the virus. Their findings, based on studying rumors circulating on the web, were published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Doctors’ frustrations fill Facebook groups and online forums. The American Medical Association and other groups representing doctors say the false information spreading online is harming the public health response to the disease. The World Health Organization is developing methods to measure the harm of virus-related misinformation online, and over two weeks in July the group hosted an online conference with doctors, public health experts and internet researchers about how to address the problem. ...

Misinformation about vaccines and other health topics has been viewed an estimated 3.8 billion times on Facebook — four times more than authoritative content from institutions such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to a study by the left-leaning global human rights group Avaaz.

The group also found that Facebook pages promulgating misleading health information got even more traffic during the pandemic than at other times — reaching a one-year peak in April — despite Facebook’s policy of removing dangerous coronavirus-related misinformation and reducing the spread of other questionable health claims. In addition, the group found, articles that had been identified as misleading by Facebook’s own network of independent third-party fact-checkers were inconsistently labeled, with the vast majority, 84 percent, of the posts in Avaaz’s sample not including a warning label from fact-checkers.