OPINION: Suggestions for countering disinformation about COVID vaccines and masks

How to Debunk Misinformation about COVID, Vaccines and Masks We each have more power to be a science communicator than we realize Kathleen Hall Jamieson Scientific American

I have spent much of my career studying ways to blunt the effects of disinformation and help the public make sense of the complexities of politics and science. When my colleagues and I probed the relation between the consumption of misinformation and the embrace, or dismissal, of protective behaviors that will ultimately stop the coronavirus’s spread, the results were clear: Those who believe false ideas and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines are less likely to engage in mask wearing, social distancing, hand washing and vaccination.

In the midst of a raging pandemic, the importance of science communication is indisputable. Mention “science communication,” though, and what comes to mind in this context are public service announcements touting the 3 Ws (Wear a mask, Watch your distance, Wash your hands) or the FAQ pages of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ask someone what “science communicator” evokes, and responses might include a family physician and experts such as Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, who appear so regularly on our screens that we think of them as friends. But Fauci isn’t on your family Zoom call when a cousin mistakenly asserts that the CDC has found that wearing a mask makes you more likely to get COVID-19. Nor is Gupta at the ready when your friend’s daughter wonders whether the COVID vaccine contains microchips designed to track us.

It matters how we respond in these moments. As Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall wrote in this magazine in 2019, the “social transmission of knowledge is at the heart of culture and science.” In a large-scale online social network experiment conducted in 2018, Doug Guilbeault and Damon Centola, both then at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, confirmed that power. When smokers and nonsmokers collaboratively evaluated antismoking messages, the smokers were more likely to acknowledge the harms of tobacco use than the smokers who evaluated the messages on their own.

Similarly Sally Chan and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I found that the level of Twitter chatter from November 2018 through February 2019 about “vaccine fraud” in the counties of our roughly 3,000 panelists were associated with negative attitudes and lower rates of flu vaccination among them later in the year. But those worrisome effects did not occur among people who reported discussing vaccines with family and friends.