FDA Limited in Fighting Misinformation: Califf

FDA commissioner Robert Califf says anyone who thinks government alone can solve the misinformation problem “is deluding themselves. We need a vast network of knowledgeable people who devote part of their day to combating misinformation,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press (AP).

Communications experts contacted by AP for its story praised the FDA effort to combat misinformation but noted that its activities have limited reach.

“FDA’s YouTube videos have a minuscule audience,” said Dartmouth College’s Brendan Nylan, who studies medical misinformation. He said those watching the agency videos “are not the people we typically think about when we think about misinformation.”

The report says that research conducted by Nylan and his colleagues found that fact-checking Covid-19 myths briefly dispels false beliefs, but the effects are “ephemeral.” He says the most trusted source of information for most Americans is their doctor, not the government.

Northwestern University political and computer scientist David Lazer told the news service that the fact that FDA puts “Rumor Control” information on its Web site can crowd out the misinformation from the top 10 or 20 Google results because the search engine prioritizes credible Web sites such as FDA’s.

Lazer said the most promising approach to fighting misinformation may be to introduce people to emerging misinformation and explain why it’s false before they encounter it elsewhere. But he questions whether FDA is nimble enough to have a misinformation detection system and then quickly put out clarifying information within hours or days.

Califf said the agency tracks new misinformation trends online and quickly decides whether and when to intervene. “Sometimes calling attention to an issue can make it worse,” he declared.

Georgetown University public health specialist Lawrence Gostin said that anyone trying to counteract misinformation on social media must clarify, simplify and explain things in an understandable way to the lay public. “I don’t think anyone could say FDA has done a good job with this,” he said.

Stanford University professor Seema Yasmin, who studies medical misinformation and trains healthcare professionals to respond to it, says the first issue is whether the person responding to misinformation is a trusted messenger. “In the context of FDA,” she said, “we can highlight multiple incidents which have damaged the credibility of the agency and deepened distrust of its scientific decisions.”

“It’s not fair, but it doesn’t take too many negative stories to unravel the public’s trust,” said Georgetown’s Leticia Bode, who studies political communication and misinformation. A survey conducted in 2022 by University of Pennsylvania researchers found that about a quarter of Americans said they have “a lot” of trust in FDA’s handling of Covid-19, while less than half said they have “some trust.”