Doctor, Doctor Tell Me the Fake News

Remember the old, not-so-funny joke, “What do you call a graduate at the bottom of his or her class from the worst medical school in the United States? Answer: ‘Doctor.’” What do you call a rich doctor who hates paying taxes? A Republican. While most doctors are truly committed to their craft, deep believers in science and scientific method and truly aware of what is real and what is quackery, there are a few who have hidden agendas, some who overprescribe medication (sometimes with incentives from the drugmakers), have participated in the opioid addiction epidemic, recommend unnecessary surgeries and treatments and have taken advantage of insurance programs (private and governmental).

For those seeking to curry favor with local politicians, enhance their own personal power or enjoy the spotlight, there is an alluring ability during a focus-grabbing pandemic to turn their white coat credibility into ego-boosting participation in the fake news syndrome. As if the politization of wearing a mask and maintaining social distancing weren’t enough, or the potentially toxic (if not fatal) bleach and hydroxychloroquine recommendations from the President were not absolutely shocking, those who have littered the ether with conspiracy theories that have too Americans literally engaging in the very risky behavior that has recently re-exploded the surge of COVID-19 infections and fatalities, there are unscrupulous doctors adding to the disinformation that just makes a terrible situation that much worse.

Their focus is on themselves, making money and reopening the economy so perhaps their stock portfolio will rise… even if kills tens if not hundreds of thousands of additional American victims. We have wonderful doctors, traveling the world to help those who have no medical alternatives. Doctors without borders. Then we have those who are simply doctors without consciences.

FastCompany.com health and technology writer, Ruth Reader, presents this ugly tale from her July 29th contribution: “On Monday night, Breitbart News launched a video of a press conference from a group of physicians called America’s Frontline Doctors, wherein several doctors repeated inaccurate claims about COVID-19, its treatments, and effects. The video reached over 20 million viewers on Facebook alone before being taken down Tuesday. The fast spread of this video and its false claims raises a big question about how much this kind of information affects people’s decisions to stay home, wear a mask, and ultimately, to get vaccinated when a COVID-19 vaccine is approved.

“In the video, a line of 10 doctors in white coats stands behind a microphone at an outdoor even hosted by the Tea Party Patriots, an organization devoted to advancing Tea Party conservative agendas and pushing America to reopen its economy and schools. They are America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that includes physicians with a history of making medically dubious claims. Among them is Texas pediatrician Dr. Stella Immanuel, a minister whose fervent anti-LGBTQIA stances and Christian ideologies often bleed into her views on medicine, according to watchdog Media Matters. It is her impassioned speech championing hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19 that has drawn the most attention. Repeated research studies show hydroxychloroquine neither reduces the length of illness in COVID-19 patients nor prevents death.

“The video is in some ways unremarkable among a lineup of other videos selling similar messaging. But what is singular about it is the sheer number of views it managed to rack up in a short amount of time, thanks in part to its spread among conservative, anti-vaccination, and government conspiracy groups on Facebook (Facebook has not responded to a request for comment). It was even shared by President Trump before Twitter deleted the video, as well as Donald Trump Jr., who had his Twitter account frozen temporarily as a result. This video has quickly blown past even the viral video Plandemic, which was seen more than 8 million times over the course of a week across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, according to The New York Times…

“Quantifying the impact of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation—a term referring to accurate information that is misrepresented—is historically difficult to do. But recently, several researchers have attempted to quantify how a person’s media diet impacts their response to COVID-19. Three studies, identified by Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingram, attempted to discern the beliefs and behaviors of those who consume conservative news. One study showed that among 1,008 respondents, those who turned to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart News, One America News, or the Drudge Report were more likely to believe several false narratives, including that the virus was developed in a lab, that some at the CDC have ‘malign motives,’ and that vitamin C can prevent COVID-19 infection. Another study showed that Fox News viewers were less likely to follow stay-at-home orders. A third compared the beliefs of viewers of Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight and looked for correlations between those views and increases in COVID-19 cases. In the early days of the pandemic, Fox host Tucker Carlson took COVID-19 seriously, while host Sean Hannity doubted the lethality of the virus. The study seems to indicate that areas where Hannity has high viewership were more associated with higher numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths during the early days of the outbreak…

“[T]he best way to understand how disinformation about the coronavirus is impacting public health may lie in the hands of the tech giants, according to Kolina Koltai, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington who studies anti-vaccination misinformation… Koltai focuses much of her work on following posts on public and private anti-vaccine groups on Facebook. While she’s able to get a fair understanding of attitudes inside of groups and the way that pieces of misinformation move from Facebook to Twitter to TikTok, she thinks that social media platforms should give researchers more access to anonymized data about the kinds of media people are engaging in and posting. If Facebook, Google, and Twitter opened up their data, she argues, it would be easier for researchers like her to make connections between what people read and post about on social media and in turn may indicate something about how they behave in the real world.

“Koltai also thinks that platforms should consult more directly with researchers on how to mitigate misinformation. Facebook has done this in the past. One such example is through Harvard’s Social Science One grants, which gave researchers access to anonymized data in an effort to better understand the effects of social media on democracy in the wake of the 2016 election.

“But [Kate Starbird, associate professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington] says that data is actually quite difficult to work with because the company adds a layer of noise to the data set to ensure anonymity. Facebook could, of course, analyze its own data without these protections in place, as it did for its 2014 mood manipulation studies, but that introduces ethical questions about user consent. ‘Surely Facebook could measure a lot of things—do we want them to be experimenting on us to measure those things? asks Starbird.

“Though it is difficult to get hard data on how impactful these campaigns ultimately are, she thinks it’s important for researchers to try and quantify them. Starbird says that without empirical evidence, platforms like Facebook are free to be lax in how they respond to misinformation… ‘We don’t have quantitative—here’s how much, and here’s how many people it’s changing, and here’s how far it’s changing their beliefs—we don’t have that,’ says Starbird. ‘And because we don’t, people who want to use these techniques and platforms that are allowing these things to manifest on their platform are able to have this plausible deniability of, ‘Oh well, we don’t know if that has an impact.’ And so I think it’s really important we start to try to answer those questions.’”

In the end, we have more than enough reason to believe that conspiracy theories and other forms of misinformation or disinformation are actually killing us and preventing any near-term hope of containing the pandemic and getting back to normal. The studies even go so far as to suggest that even when there is a vaccine (assuming we get there), this pandemic of disinformation might actually prevent a sufficient number of people from getting vaccinated to crush this virus. That the problem starts with the President of the United States just makes solving a horrific problem so much more difficult. The United States has become a massive storage depot and preservation reserve for the virus, hampering global effort to stem this deadly tide.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and simply put, until science triumphs over conspiratorial mythology, the world just might have to deal with this novel coronavirus for a long time to come.