Ian Mulvany

January 26, 2022

Some brief pointers about misinformation and the pandemic.

This news piece in Fortune by Gina Neff is worth reading - https://fortune.com/2022/01/25/we-need-a-radical-new-approach-to-tackle-scientific-misinformation-online-covid-vaccine-hesitancy-gina-neff/. It's a quick overview on the Royal Society report about the online information environment (https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/online-information-environment/), but taken from quite a personal perspective. 

While our science has made great progress against COVID in terms of vaccines and treatment protocols, we have fared far worse in the domain of winning the argument, and misinformation has cost many many lives. 

As Gary King tweeted today "The utter failure of the discipline of public health to learn how to communicate with roughly half the American public cost an absurd number of lives. How about taking a political scientist to lunch some time?" - https://twitter.com/kinggary/status/1486385184735911936




About Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!