The ugliest and most tragic consequence of misinformation is that it leads to the murder of innocent health workers. We have witnessed this on HIFA with the killing of countless polio vaccine workers in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria over the past decade and more.
And we are now seeing it in DR Congo, due to misinformation about Ebola.
'Violence against healthcare workers in DR Congo - including setting fire to ambulances and medical tents - is hampering the Ebola response, the UN and Red Cross say; per the UN count, 260+ healthcare workers have been attacked in the past six months and eight have been killed.'
Read online: https://www.rfi.fr/en/africa/20260824-violence-against-healthcare-worker...
Current efforts to combat misinformation are not enough.
I believe that what is needed is a trasformation in our approach, whereby specific tactics are complemented by holistic systems-thinking: to better understand and strengthen the global evidence ecosystem. This is the only way to improve the availability of reliable healthcare information and to protect people from misinformation. There are only two initiatives that I know of that take this approach: HIFA (2006-) and the WHO Global Coalition for Evidence (2024-). Both are severely constrained in what they can do due to lack of resources (HIFA and the Coalition have only one salaried professional each).
I echo the 2006 call of global health leaders to the Gates Foundation: "The challenge is to ensure that everyone in the world can have access to clean, clear, knowledge - a basic human right, and a public health need as important as access to clean, clear, water, and much more easily achievable." [http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673606680501/fu... This was 20 years ago, when HIFA was launched. To my knowledge, there has been no response from the Gates Foundation. My hope for 2027 is that WHO will explicitly champion universal access to reliable healthcare information and that the Gates Foundation (or any other funder) will provide modest financial support for the Global Coalition (and HIFA) to take this agenda forward.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org