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Column: Disinformation is a public health crisis. Here's how scientists and doctors are fighting it
In recent years, disinformation has seemed to be on an inexorable march across the scientific and medical landscape.
Prominent politicians, up to and including the former president, have promoted useless drugs as supposed cures for COVID-19. Partisan attacks on the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines have expanded into attacks on all vaccines. Established scientific and medical authorities have been vilified on social media and on the airwaves and even been subjected to physical assault.
The sheer volume of lies and misrepresentations injected into the political mainstream has some scientists despairing of ever regaining the public’s attention.
“Scientists really recognize this as a problem, from what they see in the community and read in the news,” says Tara Kirk Sell of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security. “They see the problems they have from misinformation and disinformation on the public health side and in the medical field and in other areas. They want to figure out how to deal with it. We’re providing some guidance for combating it and making people more resistant to it.”
Sell’s reference is to the “Practical Playbook for Addressing Health Misinformation” just released by her center. The 65-page publication amounts to a road map for identifying misinformation and disinformation and applying the best strategies for counteracting it before it spreads.
It’s part of an emerging genre of advice for scientists, public health officials and others who get confronted by rumors that interfere with their work, or by deliberate falsehoods; the latter is “disinformation,” as opposed to “misinformation,” which may simply be widely accepted misunderstandings that may have innocent sources.
UNICEF, the Yale Institute for Global Health and other organizations published one of the earliest such guides in late 2020, aimed specifically at anti-vaccine misinformation. Others have the broader goal of fighting conspiracy theories in general.
One recommendation that most seem to have in common is to take a strategic approach: Disinformation campaigns can’t be defeated by ad-hoc measures; they require an organized, proactive and targeted approach mounted by credible defenders of science.
The effort is important because the disinformation has more than political consequences; it costs lives. Pseudoscience debunker Peter Hotez calculates that as many as 200,000 Americans may have perished because of COVID after the vaccines were introduced because anti-vaccine propaganda dissuaded them from getting the shots.
Cases of measles, which should have been eradicated in the U.S. years ago, are appearing again because of disinformation about the vaccines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts more than 20 measles cases so far this year in at least 11 states. That’s about one-third of the 58 cases recorded in all of last year, counted in only the first six weeks of 2024, suggesting that a more serious epidemic may loom on the horizon.
Six cases have occurred in a single school in Florida, a state whose Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has placed anti-vaccine propaganda at the center of his public health policies. The school’s measles vaccination rate is about 89%, well below the 95% level thought to provide communal immunity protecting even the unvaccinated.
Scientists … see the problems they have from misinformation and disinformation on the public health side, and in the medical field and in other areas. They want to figure out how to deal with it.
— Tara Kirk Sell, Johns Hopkins university
As I’ve reported before, the politicization of anti-COVID measures has turbocharged healthcare disinformation more generally. In part, the reason may be that the pandemic brought public health efforts out of the shadows.
“Often, public health has been an invisible force for good,” Sell told me. “People don’t really notice it because they don’t notice not getting sick and not getting food poisoning.” During the pandemic, however, “people saw public health acting in a more visible way, that made them aware, and sometimes a little bit scared, that sometimes public health measures can be restrictive.”
Sell acknowledges that the battle against disinformation has gotten harder. One reason is that more of it emanates from government sources.
That’s a novel issue. At a simulation exercise on pandemic responses that Sell’s institute hosted for business and public health officials in October 2019, one question that came up was: What if misinformation or disinformation comes from government?
The conclusion was “that’s a crazy question,” Sell told me. “Now, it doesn’t seem that crazy. We’ve seen a lot of it.”
At a House hearing just last week, for instance, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) staged an attack on COVID vaccines consisting of misleading statistics presented out of context, unverified claims of side effects and flagrant misstatements about the consequences of COVID infection.
As I’ve reported, one of the nation’s most assiduous dispensers of anti-vaccine claptrap does so from an official perch. He’s Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who was inserted into his post by DeSantis, who may be the nation’s second-most-dangerous official offender against good sense and sound public health policy.
Ladapo’s approach to the Florida measles outbreak, which includes downplaying the need for children to be vaccinated and allowing parents to make their own decision about sending even unvaccinated children to schools experiencing an outbreak, runs counter to recommendations from the CDC. The CDC places vaccination at the very top of its recommendations for preventing the disease and advises isolating those who may transmit the virus.
A problem of longer standing for anti-disinformation crusaders is encompassed in Brandolini’s Law, coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian software engineer. Cleaned up, it states, “The amount of energy needed to refute [B.S.] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
To put it another way, disinformation peddlers need only make a claim that sounds plausible or might even have a small kernel of truth to influence the unwary. Debunking or refuting their assertions often requires offering nuanced or technical information that doesn’t have the same pizzazz.
Recognizing disinformation techniques and how they implant sticky but erroneous concepts in the minds of laypersons, Sell says, points to some useful rules of engagement. One is the value of “prebunking” — “addressing or refuting potential false information” before it’s widely disseminated, as the Johns Hopkins handbook puts it.
“People are not that creative,” she says. “They use the same stories over and over again with different health threats. You can expect that with any vaccination campaign there will be an infertility rumor, no matter what vaccine it is, or a rumor that a vaccine has been experimented on children. We see that every time. They work because they resonate” with target audiences — such as pregnant women or parents of small children.
“People need to be shown how to recognize disinformation tactics, such as an appeal to emotion” or personal stories of adverse side effects that are claimed to be representative of patients as a whole rather than rare occurrences.
It may also help to highlight the motivations of anti-science propagandists, who spread disinformation “often for social, political or financial gain.” Indeed, as the Washington Post recently documented from tax records, four nonprofit organizations that marketed medical misinformation during the pandemic saw their contributions leap by more than $100 million from 2020 to 2022.
Among them is Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is currently trying to ride his anti-vaccine crusade to the Oval Office.
The lessons of the pandemic may help the public health community avoid some of the mistakes that allowed the disinformation lobby to undermine the public’s trust in scientists and medical experts, a crucial factor in its campaigns. The CDC and other public health agencies sometimes changed their recommendations on anti-COVID policies.
That was hardly an unexpected occurrence, since so little was known at first about the virus, its effects and the most suitable treatments. But it gave their adversaries the opening they needed to question the severity of the outbreak or the policy recommendations themselves, and to promote useless nostrums.
“Public health needs to be transparent about the reasons why advice is changing,” Sell says, “explaining that if you didn’t change with new evidence, you would be doing a disservice to the public. Maybe we didn’t do a good enough job in this pandemic in saying we’re going to learn more, and our advice may change. And we’ll do our best to keep you as informed as possible as that advice changes.”
The challenge of fighting the fire hose of falsity being trained on science has made some scientists cynical about the prospects of victory, Sell acknowledges. “The Playbook is not a silver bullet,” she says. “But it helps. There are things to be done, and we can’t give up. Attacking misinformation in as many different ways as possible is something we’re going to have to do.”
Ethics experts sounded the alarm Wednesday after new financial disclosure reports revealed that President Trump’s income ballooned to $2.2 billion in 2025, with $1.4 billion coming from various new cryptocurrency-related businesses.
“It’s bribery. It’s graft. It’s exploitation of public power for private financial gain,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert in government ethics. “Trump has — with the acquiescence of a somnolent, GOP-controlled Congress and the active assistance of John Roberts’ Supreme Court — transformed the presidency into a massive corruption racket.”
Trump reported income of over $600 million in 2024. But after he entered the White House in 2025, he reported that his income had soared to more than $2.2 billion.
The 2025 annual disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics shows that Trump ramped up his real estate business in countries across the globe, particularly in the Middle East, at a time when his government was negotiating over vital issues of military aid and economic tariffs. The president also expanded his dealings in the relatively new realm of cryptocurrency.
According to the 927-page report, Trump made $635 million in royalties from Celebration Coins and more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial crypto firm. He drew in millions from a raft of Trump-branded merchandise including God Bless the USA Bibles and sneakers depicting him with his hand raised in a fist. He also brought in $10.4 million from a property in the United Arab Emirates and $9 million from a property in Saudi Arabia.
Noah Bookbinder, an ethics expert and former president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington, described Trump’s business dealings while in the White House as “entirely unprecedented, certainly in modern history, but I think by most ways of measuring, in all of American history.”
“This is corruption,” Bookbinder said. “You have a president who has been quite transparently using the presidency in ways that benefit his business interests and intertwining the presidency and business interests.”
But the president and the White House brushed aside ethics concerns about the money Trump is making.
Trump told reporters Wednesday that he made a lot of money before he came to the White House, he had “big institutions” run his money, and that he had benefited, like every other American, as the stock market went up.
“We’re all profiting,” he said. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.”
In a statement, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest. … All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
Although the report does not show exactly how much Trump is earning — it provides details of revenue, rather than profit — the scale of the president’s cryptocurrency dealings elevated ethics watchdogs’ long-standing concerns.
Jordan Libowitz, a vice president at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, said the most concerning detail of the new report is the hundreds of millions of dollars coming in from various crypto ventures partnered with companies that the American public knows little about.
“At a time when his own administration itself is setting regulation for these types of companies,” Libowitz said, “there’s just this massive opportunity for corruption when foreign governments and foreign nationals can pour tens of millions of dollars into the president’s pocket.”
As a real estate mogul, Trump has long invested in hotels, condominiums and golf courses. But cryptocurrency, Libowitz said, offers vastly more potential for corruption.
“There’s only so many hotel rooms you can book, so many rounds of golf, but there’s no limit with crypto,” Libowitz said. “You can just buy his meme coin and he gets a cut, so you kind of take out the middleman, but also the cap or the amount of money you can funnel to the president.”
Libowitz said it was also problematic for Trump to expand his real estate empire in foreign countries, particularly in the Middle East.
“Now it seems that almost all his new developments are in foreign countries, and that opens up, if you’re building this giant resort, you’re going to need help from the local government, whether it’s tax breaks or utility issues, or building a road, or speeding up permits,” Libowitz said. “These are ways that foreign governments can do favors for the American president.”
In the half a century before Trump was elected, ethics experts say, presidents from Nixon to Obama publicly released their tax returns, sold properties or put the proceeds in a blind trust managed by someone they did not know.
“They weren’t doing it because they legally had to, but because they thought it was the right thing to do,” Libowitz said.
Ever since Trump was first elected in 2016 and opted to not sell his businesses or put them in blind trusts, ethics experts have urged Congress to impose more aggressive financial oversight over money in politics.
“Congress needs to update the law, and basically, mandate blind trusts and sale of assets and disclosure of tax returns,” Libowitz said.
Noting that the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause explicitly states that the president cannot accept things of value from foreign or domestic governments, ethics experts say Trump is flouting the law and Congress has chosen to not enforce it.
Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said Congress needed to close loopholes that exempt presidents from federal conflict of interest laws as well as enforce the Foreign Emoluments Clause.
“Nobody holding a position of trust with the United States government can accept emoluments, profits and benefits from foreign governments, and that is flatly prohibited under the United States Constitution,” Painter said. “Now, if the United Arab Emirates put money into Liberty Financial, as I understand they did … and then Trump makes money off Liberty Financial, that’s a Foreign Emoluments Clause problem.”
Congress, he said, should empower an independent prosecutor to investigate such conflicts.
“The problem with the Foreign Emoluments Clause is how do we enforce it?” Painter said. “The founders and head of the Congress enforced it by impeaching anybody who took a bunch of foreign government money, but I guess that system’s not working. That’s a serious problem.”
The race to bring air travel to the sky is heating up as Santa Cruz-based Joby Aviation and Toyota launch a joint venture to commercially produce air taxis.
The companies said in a news release Tuesday that they will work together on productivity, quality and costs and move toward mass production of Joby’s electric vertical takeoff aircraft. Joby and Toyota were first linked when Toyota made a nearly $400-million investment in the company in 2020. It has since increased its backing of the company to $900 million.
“It’s really meaningful for us to take on this challenge together with Joby, a partner that shares the same vision,” Toyota Chair Akio Toyoda said. “We believe this strengthened relationship is an important step forward in realizing the future mobility society.”
Joby‘s all-electric vertical takeoff vehicles are designed to hold four passengers and a pilot and can travel at up to 200 mph. The vehicle uses six tilting propellers to achieve vertical takeoff before switching to forward flight.
In February, Joby announced a partnership with Uber to start service in the United Arab Emirates this year, bringing on-demand air taxi rides to the country. It plans to expand to the U.S. after the completion of its final stage of Federal Aviation Administration testing.
Prior to its full FAA certification, Joby is hoping to launch early flight operations later this year as part of a White House program that will bring flights to several states, including New York, Texas and Arizona. Flights in California will not begin until after obtaining FAA certification.
Joby has been in a fierce battle to be the first with taxis in the sky with its Northern California competitor Archer Aviation. The two companies are involved in overlapping lawsuits, with Joby alleging corporate espionage against Archer, and Archer filing a suit alleging dubious ties to China that sparked an investigation into Joby by the U.S. International Trade Commission.
“Toyota has been by Joby’s side for nearly a decade, providing invaluable guidance and support as we built the foundation for manufacturing our aircraft,” JoeBen Bevirt, Joby’s chief executive and founder, said in the news release. “Together, we share a vision of making aerial mobility an everyday reality, and we look forward to delivering on that promise together.”
Joby Aviation’s shares, which have fallen more than 30% this year, climbed 3% on Tuesday to $8.92.
Disneyland Resort in Anaheim will offer $59 tickets for select evening admission to either theme park as part of a new promotion.
The one-day, one-park evening ticket offer will allow attendees to enter Disney California Adventure at 5 p.m. or Disneyland at 7 p.m. Park reservations are still required, as has been the case since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The offer only applies for admission from July 12 through Aug. 5 on Sundays to Wednesdays.
Disneyland Resort is commemorating its 70th anniversary through Aug. 9, and has introduced new shows and additions to rides as part of the occasion.
Walt Disney Co.’s theme parks and experiences business are a crucial boost to its finances, making up about 56% of the company’s operating income last fiscal year.
During the Burbank-based company’s most recent earnings call in May, Disney executives said attendance at its U.S.-based parks was down 1% compared with the prior year, a shift they attributed to “continued softness” in international visitations. However, the company said at the time that it was starting to move past those issues.
Disney’s experiences division reported $9.5 billion in revenue in that fiscal second quarter, up 7% compared with the same period a year ago, something executives said was due to higher guest spending domestically and more capacity on its cruise line.
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