If someone dropped a bomb on Canada that killed 2,800 people, sent 13,000 Canadians to hospital and caused $300 million in damage, the country would certainly take it seriously and mount a serious response.
However, such a bomb fell. It’s called misinformation.
The figures mentioned above come from a report by experts from the Council of Canadian Academies who looked at the consequences of vaccine hesitancy during nine months of the pandemic, between March and November 2021.
At that time, vaccines against COVID-19 were available in the country. But the false information circulating prevented or delayed the vaccination of more than 2 million Canadians.
Result: hospitalizations, deaths, costs for the health system which are counted in hundreds of millions of dollars1.
It is rare to be able to quantify the impacts of misinformation in this way – a term that encompasses false information spread deliberately as well as that conveyed inadvertently.
The magnitude of the figures must make us react.
Especially since they only represent the tip of the iceberg. The study by the Council of Canadian Academies concerns only one specific subject – vaccine hesitancy – for a very limited period. And it only assesses the direct costs. Delays in operations caused by avoidable hospitalizations, for example, are not even counted.
However, false information on all kinds of subjects circulates abundantly, leading individuals to make bad choices, exacerbating the cleavage of discourse and complicating public interventions.
What are we doing against this threat? Considering its impacts, really not enough.
The fight must take place in two stages.
The first involves long-term work. If misinformation hits the bull’s eye, it’s largely because too many citizens have lost faith in institutions like governments and the media.
This loss of confidence is not always rational. It remains that a work of introspection is essential. We too often see politicians stirring up divisions for partisan reasons, an extremely dangerous reflex. Same thing when the media chooses to bet on polarization and drop nuance.
The solution also involves education, first and foremost at school.
In the shorter term, the thankless and difficult work must be done: going into the trenches and combating false information.
Some do it brilliantly, from the Rumor Detector of Agence Science-Presse to the “fact checks” of The Press through Radio-Canada’s Décrypteurs. But despite the crucial role they play, the mainstream media unfortunately does not reach the most radical fringe of the misinformed.
Since the start of the pandemic, one of those who have fought misinformation most effectively has been Mathieu Nadeau-Vallée. Nicknamed the “doc of TikTok”, he intervenes on social networks and fights falsehoods with facts, taking the blows that invariably rain down when one frequents such grounds.
Mathieu Nadeau-Vallée is a free spirit, which gives him the advantage of not being associated with institutions hit by the loss of confidence. But this independence comes with a setback: even though his Facebook page is run by a team of volunteers, he remains a medical student who does what he can in his spare time.
Faced with algorithms designed to promote the spread of fake news on social networks, the fight is therefore very unequal.
The closest thing to a concerted effort is the Science First initiative of the Canadian Association of Science Centres.
There are capsules that can be easily shared on social networks in both French and English – some are even translated into Farsi, Hindi and other languages.
COVID-19, environment, vaccines, mental health: the topics covered are numerous and the scientific content is reviewed by a group of experts. The initiative involves many organizations including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the main federal funding agency for health research2.
This is exactly the kind of initiative that needs more support and dissemination.
The report also shows that there’s a whole science out there about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to getting the facts straight and convincing people. This science also needs to be better known and disseminated.
There is no one answer to misinformation. But the fight must be waged with more resources and in a better coordinated way than at present.
As the chairman of the committee of experts Alex Himelfarb rightly asserts in the introduction to the report, we cannot hope to overcome the enormous challenges facing our societies if we cannot even manage to agree on what happens.