The government agency responsible for tracking down contaminated peanut butter and defective pacemakers is taking on a new health hazard: online misinformation.
But FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf has spent the last year warning that growing “distortions and half-truths” surrounding vaccines and other medical products are now “a leading cause of death in America.”
The FDA’s answer? Short YouTube videos, long Twitter threads and other online postings debunking medical misinformation, including bogus COVID-19 remedies like ivermectin, the anti-parasite drug intended for farm animals. “Hold your horses y’all. Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn’t authorized or approved to treat COVID-19″ the FDA told its 500,000 Twitter followers in April.
In the last two years the FDA has come under fire for its controversial approval of an unproven Alzheimer’s drug as well as its delayed response to a contaminated baby formula plant, which contributed to a national supply shortage. “The FDA’s word is still one of the most highly regarded pieces of information people want to see,” said Califf, who was confirmed to his second stint leading the FDA last February.
Georgetown’s Bode said the agency is “moving in the right direction,” on misinformation, particularly its “Just a Minute” series of factchecking videos, which feature FDA’s vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks succinctly addressing a single COVID-19 myth or topic.“FDA’s YouTube videos have a minuscule audience,” said Brandon Nyhan, who studies medical misinformation at Dartmouth College. The people watching FDA videos “are not the people we typically think about when we think about misinformation.
“Because the FDA puts that information on its website, it will actually crowd out the misinformation from the top 10 or 20 Google results,” said David Lazer, a political and computer scientist at Northeastern University.
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