Misinformation can thwart even a robust pandemic response.
 | By Kristin Lin Editorial Assistant, Opinion Audio |
From the government's confusing shift in Covid safety guidance to questions about whether rapid tests are reliable enough for detecting Omicron, many have felt like the latest variant caught the United States flat-footed. |
But as case rates begin to fall, hopefully for good, we're once again pushed to ask the perennial pandemic questions: What's next, and how can the country better prepare for it? |
That's what Kara Swisher asks Ashish Jha and Emily Oster, two prominent experts who have helped the public assess risks throughout the pandemic. We wanted to bring them together for the latest episode of Times Opinion's podcast Sway to help clear up our Covid confusion and to discuss the wide-ranging impacts of the pandemic — in terms of case and hospitalization rates, of course, but also in terms of its impact on families, the economy and our mental health. (As Kara said when we were preparing for this conversation, which I helped produce, "Every family I know is at the edge of sanity.") |
Part of the difficulty of navigating this wave of the pandemic is the feeling that the virus keeps outpacing our knowledge of it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has had to issue guidance more hastily, and people are feeling whiplash around public health messaging. |
Which is why something that Jha, a physician and the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said in the conversation stuck out: He's particularly worried about medical misinformation, and how it might dampen any response efforts. "To me, this is the biggest challenge at this point in the pandemic," he says. "You could argue that if we did not have this level of incident and misinformation, we would have managed Omicron very, very differently." |
His concern is shared by other physicians and public health experts, many of whom signed an open letter to Spotify, urging the company to crack down on coronavirus misinformation, including on an episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" that featured Robert Malone, a critic of mRNA vaccines who has made baseless claims about their dangers. |
The question of how to rein in medical misinformation, which risks thwarting even a well-coordinated pandemic response, is an urgent one. Jha says he's starting to think about misinformation as a scientific problem: "We really have to kind of apply that lens, understand it, and then come up with tools to counter it. And if we do, I think we're going to be in better shape, but this is the work of many months and many years ahead." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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