Simple solutions to wicked problems: Cultivating true believers of anti-vaccine conspiracies during the COVID-19 pandemic

The pandemic has produced an abundance of medical misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Many of these narratives appear impervious to scientific evidence and indifferent to the authority of the state. This has resulted in ‘true believers' being cast as paranoid and irrational. In this article, we take a different approach by exploring the cultural appeal of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Drawing on qualitative analysis of two leading figures of the anti-vaccination movement – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joseph Mercola – we demonstrate how these influencers establish authority by staging indignation against a corrupt scientific establishment and positioning themselves as Truthers offering simple solutions to complex (wicked) problems. By conceptualising what we refer to as the Truther Playbook, we examine how anti-vaccine Truthers capitalise on existing grievances and conditions of low institutional trust to further solidify people's troubled relationship with institutional expertise while drawing attention to the structural conditions and social inequalities that facilitate belief in conspiracy theories. We contend that conspiracy theories offer not only offer alternative facts and narratives but are predicated on identification and in-group membership, highlighting the limits of debunking as a strategy to tackle disinformation. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of European Journal of Cultural Studies is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Twenty-First Century Global ADR Management: A Need for Clarification, Redesign, and Coordinated Action.

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are estimated to be between the fourth and sixth most common cause of death worldwide, taking their place among other prevalent causes of mortality such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke. ADRs impact a broad range of populations across a wide variety of global geography and demographics, with significant mortality and morbidity burden in vulnerable groups such as older people, pediatric populations, and individuals in low-income settings. Too large a share of medicines risk management remains limited to signal detection in big ADR databases (USFDA, EMA, WHO, etc.) This resource allocation is antiquated and applied statistical signal detection methodologies have reached their limits of usefulness. In addition, existing databases are designed for short-term reactions, closely related to medication use and, thus, can only partially assess important broader consequences across geography, time, and clinical relevance. There is an urgent need change the dynamic. We need to identify (earlier and more regularly) many of the important but often overlooked or missed ADRs. Rather than assigning blame, we need to identify the root causes of the problem so they can be clearly addressed and fixed. The public health implications are profound-particularly as we recognize the importance of predicting and mitigating the next pandemic. Consequently, medicines risk management must be integrated within a broader global public health vision. To accomplish this, we need to develop the new tools and methodologies critical to assessing these public health imperatives.

Social media medical misinformation: impact on mental health and vaccination decision among university students.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need of social media as a medium for gathering health-related information. Simultaneously, a slew of false information, primarily about COVID-19's origin, dissemination, prevention, treatment, and fatality surfaced, making it difficult to distinguish fake from genuine material. However, the possible effects on mental health and the extent to which this influences our decisions, particularly regarding vaccination, are unknown. AIM: The purpose of this questionnaire-based cross-sectional study was to examine Lebanese University students' perceptions of social media influence during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to measure the impact of misinformation on respondents' mental health and vaccination decisions. METHODS: In total, 440 students took part and were asked to complete an online survey that included questions on social media trust, the "general health questionnaire index" (GHQ-12), and a scale measuring "attitude towards vaccination". RESULTS: Our data demonstrated a low frequency of mental health disorders among Lebanese University students, which was correlated to frequent social media exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings suggested that students are more aware of misinformation and had lower rates of despair and anxiety than the general population. Furthermore, Facebook use was associated with worse attitude and behaviour towards vaccination (p = 0.001), but a better mental health. Twitter had the inverse effect (p = 0.002). CONCLUSION: It is a necessity to use social media correctly in health-related topics, to push governments and platforms towards making decisions about false and invalidated posts.

Monant Medical Misinformation Dataset: Mapping Articles to Fact-Checked Claims

False information has a significant negative influence on individuals as well as on the whole society. Especially in the current COVID-19 era, we witness an unprecedented growth of medical misinformation. To help tackle this problem with machine learning approaches, we are publishing a feature-rich dataset of approx. 317k medical news articles/blogs and 3.5k fact-checked claims. It also contains 573 manually and more than 51k automatically labelled mappings between claims and articles. Mappings consist of claim presence, i.e., whether a claim is contained in a given article, and article stance towards the claim. We provide several baselines for these two tasks and evaluate them on the manually labelled part of the dataset. The dataset enables a number of additional tasks related to medical misinformation, such as misinformation characterisation studies or studies of misinformation diffusion between sources.

Empowering Without Misinforming Adolescents and Young Adults with Cystic Fibrosis. Comment on “Perceptions of Social Media Use to Augment Health Care Among Adolescents and Young Adults With Cystic Fibrosis: Survey Study”

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WHO NEEDS THE RED PILL: HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE WARS ON TWITTER

Аbstract. The paper discusses the emergence of misinformation about the COVID19 treatment on Twitter during the scientific and public discussion about the effectiveness of the hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for the treatment of the disease. The authors analyze direct and indirect influence of media personas on the misinformation spread basing on the 1,356 information cascades found in a collection of 10 million tweets published from March 30 to July 13, 2020. The complied list of personas involved in active discussion of the COVID19 treatment in information cascades showed that the most popular sources of health information for Twitter users are posts from politicians. The discussions around the tweets from politicians produce deep cascades distorting the content of the original message and increasing the emotionality. Semantic and discourse analysis of the tweets allowed to identify the main reasons for the distortion of reliable medical information and the emergence of disinformation disseminated by users commenting on tweets of the media personas. It was found that medical information is distorted in information cascades due to confusion of terms in user's comments, substitution of logical connections with associative ones, omission of essential details, unjustified generalization, and exaggeration of the significance of references to the personal experience. An important reason of misinformation is the politicization and polarization of the discussion of the COVID19 treatment. © 2021 Russian Public Opinion Research Center, VCIOM. All rights reserved.

Search like an expert: Reducing expertise disparity using a hybrid neural index for COVID-19 queries.

Consumers from non-medical backgrounds often look for information regarding a specific medical information need; however, they are limited by their lack of medical knowledge and may not be able to find reputable resources. As a case study, we investigate reducing this knowledge barrier to allow consumers to achieve search effectiveness comparable to that of an expert, or a medical professional, for COVID-19 related questions. We introduce and evaluate a hybrid index model that allows a consumer to formulate queries using consumer language to find relevant answers to COVID-19 questions. Our aim is to reduce performance degradation between medical professional queries and those of a consumer. We use a universal sentence embedding model to project consumer queries into the same semantic space as professional queries. We then incorporate sentence embeddings into a search framework alongside an inverted index. Documents from this index are retrieved using a novel scoring function that considers sentence embeddings and BM25 scoring. We find that our framework alleviates the expertise disparity, which we validate using an additional set of crowdsourced-consumer-queries even in an unsupervised setting. We also propose an extension of our method, where the sentence encoder is optimised in a supervised setup. Our framework allows for a consumer to search using consumer queries to match the search performance with that of a professional.

A Pilot Study of Medical Misinformation Perceptions and Training Among Practitioners in North Carolina (USA).

Medical misinformation (MM) is a problem for both medical practitioners and patients in the 21st century. Medical practitioners have anecdotally reported encounters with patient-held misinformation, but to date we lack evidence that quantifies this phenomenon. We surveyed licensed practitioners in the state of North Carolina to better understand how often patients mention MM in the clinical setting, and if medical practitioners are trained to engage with patients in these specific conversations. We administered an anonymous, online survey to physicians and physician assistants licensed to practice in the state of North Carolina. Questions focused on demographics, clinical encounters with MM, and training to discuss MM with patients. We received over 2800 responses and analyzed 2183 after removing ineligible responses. Our results showed that most respondents encountered MM from patients (94.2% (2047/2183)), with no significant differences between clinical specialty, time spent in practice, or community type. When asked about specific training, 18% (380/2081) reported formal experiences and 39% (807/289) reported informal experiences. MM has been salient due to the COVID-19 pandemic; however, it was present before and will remain after the pandemic. Given that MM is widespread but practitioners lack training on engaging patients in these conversations, a sustained effort to specifically train current and future practitioners on how to engage patients about MM would be an important step toward mitigating the spread of MM.