4. The Politics of Health: Public Health & Misinformation

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Monday it would no longer post on X and would use rival Bluesky instead, becoming the latest organisation to quit a social media platform that some have criticised for its content.

Scientific expertise matters and lives are at stake. It’s time to park egos, politics, conjecture, pseudoscience, propaganda—and anecdotes.

A new Canadian Medical Association survey suggests that health misinformation is on the rise. Law professor and research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta Tim Caulfield gives examples of health and science misinformation, breaks down how to spot it, and offers tips on how we can talk to friends and family about misinformation they might believe is true. For transcripts of The Dose, please visit: lnk.to/dose-transcripts [https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/the-dose-transcripts-listen-1.6732281]. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. For more episodes of this podcast, click this link. [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dose/id1498259551]

It is found that conspiracy mentality and science literacy both play important roles in believing viral and deceptive claims about science, but evidence for the importance of conspiracy mentality in the rejection of science is much more mixed. Abstract. Members of the public can disagree with scientists in at least two ways: people can reject well-established scientific theories and they can believe fabricated, deceptive claims about science to be true. Scholars examining the reasons for these disagreements find that some individuals are more likely than others to diverge from scientists because of individual factors such as their science literacy, political ideology, and religiosity. This study builds on this literature by examining the role of conspiracy mentality in these two phenomena. Participants were recruited from a national online panel (N = 513) and in person from the first annual Flat Earth International Conference (N = 21). We found that conspiracy mentality and science literacy both play important roles in believing viral and deceptive claims about science, but evidence for the importance of conspiracy mentality in the rejection of science is much more mixed.

Today's pseudoscience-ridden wellness industry, valued at a breathtaking $5.6 trillion worldwide, owes a great debt to its forefathers.

Kennedy used a study by a number of his allies to defend his discredited claims about vaccines and autism.

Original court documents tell a different story than the one contained in a viral blog post from a convoy-friendly National Post columnist

The inside story on how one federal library's journals and documents ended up in a dumpster.

From students to politicians, many smart people have fallen for dangerous lies spread about the new coronavirus. Why? And how can you protect yourself from misinformation?

Send this to the person in your life who needs to read it.

An Instagram post claims Bill Gates hosted an event that is tied to the coronavirus outbreak, which started weeks later. We rate that claim false.

Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, aggregated from sources all over the world by Google News.

Conspiracy peddlers of every stripe are increasingly twisting the pandemic to bolster their world views—and to claim that perhaps it's not real at all.

'Things that make you go hmm'

To help increase trust in vaccines, researchers analyzed data on adverse events to address safety concerns, and then used cognitive science to show how cognitive biases feed vaccine hesitancy.

Q: How do people who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19 pose a risk to people who have been vaccinated? A: An unvaccinated person who is infected with COVID-19 poses a much greater risk to others who are also unvaccinated. But vaccines are not 100% effective, so there is a chance that an unvaccinated person could infect a vaccinated person — particularly the vulnerable, such as elderly and immunocompromised individuals.

The term is making the rounds online, but it isn't based on factual medical information. It's bunk.

Coronavirus shots are overwhelmingly safe. Just don’t tell the cottage industry of sleuths obsessed with proving otherwise.

Vaccine hesitancy is often met with one of two responses: Ridicule, or factual information. Both assume a failure of reason, but human behaviour is more complex than reason, so both responses fail.

Download scientific diagram | Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Note. The highest value on the heatmap scale is 20 units for liberals, and 12 units for conservatives. Moral circle rings, from inner to outer, are described as follows: (1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence from publication: Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle | Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism),... | morals, Compassion and Empathy | ResearchGate, the professional network for scientists.

62K votes, 1.9K comments. 3.1M subscribers in the MurderedByWords community. A place for well-constructed put-downs, comebacks, and counter-arguments.

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

565 votes, 102 comments. A good dissection of bullshit "science" about vaccines (RFK Jr is probably rock hard reading the original paper) - this…

1.7K votes, 119 comments. 4.5M subscribers in the psychology community. A Reddit community for sharing and discussing science-based psychological…

2.4K votes, 970 comments. Trump removed Fauci’s security detail this week, despite Fauci receiving death threats…

387 votes, 43 comments. 234K subscribers in the skeptic community. A sub for "scientific skepticism." Scientific Skepticism is about combining…

A task force created by the UCP government to review the province's pandemic response has issued its final report and, while it is currently being reviewed by the province, Alberta doctors are pushing back, saying it contains misinformation and poses a threat to public health.

Looking back on our conversation with the author and activist on how the left let the far right build a mirror world of negative politics — and how it can change