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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.”
Decades of Hollywood empire-building ended with a quake in 2017 when Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch decided to sell much of his Fox entertainment holdings amid the rise of Netflix and other tech giants.
This week, another titan who has been instrumental in shaping American media and telecommunications began to unwind his Hollywood holdings.
Brian L. Roberts — who with his father built Comcast into a cable TV and internet colossus — announced his company would spin off its prestigious NBCUniversal unit into a separate publicly traded company sometime next year.
The move reverses Roberts’ purchase of NBCUniversal in 2011 — a bold bet that created a behemoth with popular programming and cable pipes to pump that content into consumer homes.
Comcast’s breakup marks the close of a Hollywood era, one dominated for 40 years by a class of maverick moguls: Murdoch, CNN founder Ted Turner, Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, cable titan John Malone and the Philadelphia-based Roberts family.
Now, a new crop of leaders has emerged, reflecting Silicon Valley’s vast influence over the film and and TV business, which has been upended by streaming and, now, artificial intelligence.
“There was a time that Murdoch, Malone and Brian were really industry leaders who could affect change,” said Bank of America managing director Jessica Reif Ehrlich in an interview. “That’s not true any longer.”
Analysts widely believe Monday’s announcement is a prelude to eventual sales of both Comcast and NBCUniversal, a theory that Comcast rejects.
Roberts, 67, told analysts he will remain involved in both NBCUniversal and Comcast after the separation. Still, he plans to relinquish his chief executive role after 25 years and a half century at Comcast. Roberts has picked trusted associates to run each firm, and his family will continue to hold controlling shares of both companies.
But the shift underscores a dramatic loss of clout by Comcast and other traditional media enterprises. Netflix, Apple, Amazon and Google’s YouTube have diminished the industry’s financial pillars — box office receipts and cable programming fees — and given consumers control over when and how they watch programming.
Murdoch was the first to flee. In 2014, he was rebuffed in his $80-billion bid to beef up his 21st Century Fox by buying HBO, CNN and other Time Warner assets. Murdoch’s defeat led to the Fox asset sale to Walt Disney Co.
Last fall, Comcast made a run for the same properties with a plan to unite NBCUniversal with Warner Bros.
Instead, 43-year-old tech scion David Ellison — with help from his billionaire father, Oracle software co-founder Larry Ellison — scooped up the prize for a staggering $111 billion.
The pending blockbuster merger of Ellison’s Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery is expected to reshape the industry and leave NBCUniversal increasingly vulnerable to a takeover.
“It looks like Comcast’s NBCUniversal was left standing on the dance floor without a partner,” MoffettNathanson media analyst Robert Fishman wrote in a Tuesday note to investors.
Paramount’s play for Warner Bros. came a month after Ellison finalized his family’s purchase of cash-strapped Paramount from Shari Redstone. The one-two acquisition punch would propel the Ellison family to top-tier moguls with influence over CNN, CBS News, HBO, Turner Classic Movies and two historic Hollywood studios.
“It’s a flagging industry. … The industry will have to consolidate to survive,” said C. Kerry Fields, a USC Marshall School of Business economics professor. “Those who have content plus [streaming] distribution are going to be the winners.”
Roberts knows distribution. His father in 1963 bought his first cable TV system in Tupelo, Miss. It was a quirky bet for Ralph Roberts, who figured his belts and suspenders business would soon be toast as beltless polyester pants became the rage.
Brian Roberts joined Comcast as a high school intern, setting up supermarket promotions. In 1975, he became a trainee cable installer, climbing poles and stringing cables. He joined Comcast full time in 1981 after graduating the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
For more than 30 years, he worked in tandem with his dad. With key associates, they built the nation’s foremost cable TV service — then the entertainment gateway — and grew stronger by offering internet, phone and then wireless service.
Analysts credit the 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal as a huge success; Comcast rescued a company that was on the ropes due to General Electric’s under-investment.
Over the years, Comcast rebuilt NBC and Spanish-language Telemundo, writing big checks for the best sports rights, including the FIFA World Cup, NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball.
Comcast also recognized value in theme parks and invested heavily, building Universal Studios as a formidable rival to Disney. NBC finished the season in first-place among traditional TV broadcasters and its L.A. film studio is an industry leader.
But the world has changed.
“One of the defining characteristics of this company has always been our willingness to look ahead, embrace change, and position ourselves for the future,” Roberts told analysts during a Monday call.
Reif Ehrlich, the Bank of America analyst, said Comcast needed to do something — or watch its stagnant stock sink farther.
Wall Street has punished the company amid steep losses in its cable TV and broadband internet units, and because NBCUniversal has historically generated its biggest profits from its cable channels.
In January, Comcast spun off those networks, including CNBC, MS NOW, USA Network and Golf Channel, to create a new entity called Versant.
But the move failed to boost Comcast’s battered stock, which dropped 3.3% on Wednesday to $23.73.
Five years ago, Comcast stock topped $50 a share.
“It was just a very challenged market on both sides, and it’s getting worse, not better,” Reif Ehrlich said.
Comcast faces competitors beyond traditional telecommunications firms, including AT&T and T-Mobile. SpaceX’s Starlink provides satellite internet service.
NBCUniversal must jockey alongside other well-capitalized players, including Amazon, Netflix and Disney. NBC’s streaming service, Peacock, has struggled to get traction. It counted 46 million paying subscribers as of the first quarter, a fraction of Netflix’s 325 million and the nearly 132 million subscribers of Disney+.
“It’s kind of a subscale player,” Reif Ehrlich said. “It’s just a real battle, and NBC has expensive sports rights.”
Roberts conceded the difficult landscape on the analyst call.
“The world is changing faster than ever,” Roberts said. “Technology, consumer behavior, competition, capital requirements are all evolving at an unprecedented pace … When we acquired NBCUniversal, more than 15 years ago, the industry looked very different.”
He will retain control for at least three years. The NBCUniversal spin-off is envisioned as a tax-free transaction for shareholders, providing a short-term buffer from deal-making to preserve that structure.
NBCUniversal could be up for grabs by 2029 — a pivotal year when the NFL is expected to open negotiations for a new round of broadcast rights. That auction is expected to draw heavy interest from Amazon and other streamers — not just veterans Fox, NBC, Disney’s ESPN and Paramount’s CBS.
“Brian Roberts has already proven his willingness to play the long game and with continued control should be the end decision maker,” Fishman said.
Much like Murdoch, who is now 95 and partially retired.
“Rupert was the smartest guy in Hollywood — he got out at the top,” Reif Ehrlich said.
He entrusted power to his 54-year-old son, Lachlan, who has been busy remaking Fox after the 2019 sale to Disney, which included Fox’s film and TV studios, streaming service Hulu and the FX and National Geographic channels. Fox also unloaded its regional cable sports networks — a savvy move before that business cratered.
The Murdochs kept Fox Sports, the Fox broadcast network, TV stations, Fox News Channel and the studio lot.
The company has been expanding. Lachlan Murdoch led Fox’s purchase of Tubi, which provides free TV channels and movies for smart televisions, keeping Fox in the streaming game. The company launched Fox News and weather products, and subscription service Fox One, which streams the company’s sports and news.
Earlier this month, Lachlan Murdoch stunned the industry by agreeing to pay $22 billion for Roku, a leading streaming platform that reaches 100 million viewers worldwide. Murdoch called the proposed purchase “a defining moment for Fox.”
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.
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