the report doesn’t contain recommendations. the cca’s reports don’t, by design. the goal is to inform policy, not to direct government, a spokesperson said.
but misinformation matters, himelfarb said, because an “abundance of evidence” shows it causes preventable illness, preventable death and makes people “vulnerable to financial exploitation.”
it also holds. “it’s sticky,” he said. an abacus poll in june 2021 found that 19 per cent of 1,500 adults surveyed, the equivalent of 5.6 million adults, believe “covid vaccines have killed many people which has been covered up.” eleven per cent believed the vaccines contain secret chips “designed to monitor and control human behavior.”
but scientific research is also fallible, the panel report notes. “misinformation can be the product of systemic failures in science and medicine, and in the communication of scientific knowledge and research findings,” it reads. finding that don’t replicate and weak methodologies are among the reasons why “no one study can be treated as definitive.”
some claims represented initially as “information,” become “misinformation” as new knowledge emerges, the report said.
maya goldenberg, a university of guleph philosophy professor and expert in vaccine hesitancy, said public institutions that are supposed to keep the public safe have a responsibility to foster and maintain trust. “a lot of people felt abandoned during this pandemic — public outreach did not reach them; their needs were not met — and the response was to turn away and reject all public health communications, and even to respond and protest angrily,” goldenberg said.