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BMJ and Disinformation (3)

23 October, 2024

The authors of the BMJ article (https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj.q2187) write: “In the UK, people’s intent to ‘definitely’ take the covid vaccine dropped by 6.2 percentage points, and in the US by 6.4 percentage points, after participants were exposed to misinformation—showing how misinformation can lead to vaccine hesitancy and impede efforts to control disease spread.” They provide as a reference for this strong statement a study they conducted (doi:10.1038/s41562-021-01056-1 pmid:33547453). In this study, in each country, they exposed 3,000 people to misinformation (treatment group) and 1,000 people to accurate information related to COVID-19 vaccines and measured a decrease of the acceptance of the vaccine in the treatment group.

This kind of protocol has been used in many studies whose results are supposed to evaluate the negative impact of misinformation on COVID-19 vaccination. However, they don’t reproduce real life. In real life, studies have shown that people are much more exposed to accurate information than to misinformation about COVID-19 on the internet, social networks, and traditional media. In real life, why would people be more influenced by misinformation than by the most frequent accurate information? It is as if someone were drawing conclusions on the efficacy of a medical treatment based on in vitro experiments.

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HIFA profile: Bernard Seytre is a Consultant at BNSCommunication in France. Professional interests: Health communication and education. seytre AT bnscom.fr