FDA commissioner Robert Califf said in an interview that aired this week that misinformation is killing Americans — contributing to the fact that our life expectancy is 3 to 5 years worse than that of people in comparably wealthy countries. He called for better regulation to crack down on misinformation. But would such rules help?
I studied medical misinformation as part of a journalism fellowship, and as I’ve written in previous columns, there is a real danger when misinformed people skip lifesaving vaccines or buy into risky, untested treatments. Yet policing misinformation is tricky.
The fact-checking industry may even make the problem worse by confusing value judgments with facts, and by portraying science as a set of immutable facts, rather than a system of inquiry that constructs provisional theories based on imperfect data.
