FDA’s Daunting Task to Tackle Misinformation: Califf
Amplifying the Reagan-Udall Foundation’s just-released report on misinformation, FDA commissioner Robert Califf has outlined a daunting task the agency faces to combat misinformation that is proliferating due to the “power of the Internet, the digitization of our world, and the preponderance of what is commonly referred to as social media.” The report, Strategies for Improving Public Understanding of FDA-Regulated Products, discusses topline strategies that focus on delivering clear, consistent, and timely messages with a focus on pre-bunking (warning about) potential misinformation. “Everyone at FDA, not just professional communicators, has a role to play in improving public understanding of FDA and the products it regulates,” it says.
In prepared remarks for a public meeting on the report 10/5 at the foundation, Califf said it “focuses on technological changes that have increased the ability of many to accumulate and share resources and to transcend previously existing boundaries, with few or no standards to guide them. In the past, our voice at the FDA was considered authoritative and the communications ecosystem was relatively simple. Now, we are one of many voices in a cacophony of information and opinions. Exacerbating that impact is the fact that many of those voices are intent on diminishing or undermining our role.”
With the increasing number of voices and outlets for information, Califf recognized the benefits of free speech. But he said his concern grows “when that speech poses an increased threat to public health, in great part because much of the information from many of these voices is unreliable or lacks scientific support and provides inaccurate and sometimes harmful information – misinformation – which can cause people to make plainly uninformed and adverse choices regarding their health.”
Califf warned that many of those same voices “also contribute directly to the longer-term undermining of trust in authoritative sources and experts, including the FDA and the erosion of scientific facts – disinformation, that is misinformation that causes harm. And yet, even as trust in the agency has dropped, at least partially as a result of these attacks, according to this report, the good news is that there remains both a strong foundation for building back that trust and a vital need to do so.”
To illustrate the agency’s frustration with misinformation, Califf cited a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll that showed 34% of Americans believed that Covid-19 vaccines have caused thousands of sudden deaths. “I’ve spent my career studying sudden death and looked carefully at our post-marketing data — this is wrong and explains why people are hesitant to get vaccinated!, he said. “The fact is that those who are up to date on vaccinated are much less likely to die.”
So what’s next? Califf said the agency must “develop new and better ways to cut through and counter the misinformation and the disinformation so that we can meet our responsibilities and provide the public with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about public health. While this report is not an examination, per se, of the FDA’s work in this area, it does offer a number of options for us to build on what we are already doing to strengthen our response and help ensure that we continue to be a trusted, reliable voice that can cut through the noise.”
Additionally, Califf said FDA’s efforts will “require enormous collaboration -- across our agency, and more broadly across the health care community. This is a challenge that goes to the structural foundation of our society, and it is a job far too big for any one agency to take on. But respond we must. As the writer George Moore said, “A winner is just a loser who tried one more time.”