Is digital disinformation fueling a slide in U.S. life expectancies?
That’s the premise of an argument forwarded by U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf.
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Online misinformation has joined factors like income, education, race, and unhealthy lifestyle practices in falling life expectancy numbers, Califf told CNBC in a recent interview.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy at birth declined by 0.9% from 2020-to-2021 to 76.1 years. That after a one-year falloff in 2020, the CDC reported. Combined, that’s the largest life expectancy decline since 1921-to-1923.
Americans’ dubious choices for health care practices and medications, based on what Califf believes is misinformation, is at the heart of the life expectancy decline.
“It’s looking worse, not better, over the last several years,” Califf tells CNBC. “(So) why aren’t we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influenced their thinking.”
Even a single social media post from a major influencer touting a questionable – or flat-out wrong – take on a specific lifestyle or medical condition is enough to tilt the scale against healthier consumer decisions, Califf said.
“You think about the impact of a single person reaching a billion people on the internet all over the world, we just weren’t prepared for that,” Califf noted. “We don’t have societal rules that are adjudicating it quite right, and I think it’s impacting our health in very detrimental ways.”
Calling out and banning misinformation should fall to “specific authorities at the FDA, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and other areas” Califf told CNBC.
Government healthcare policymakers face an uphill climb with an increasingly skeptical U.S. public, especially when it comes to pandemic-related healthcare management.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/2023/feb/restoring-trust-public-health
“The public health enterprise is facing a crisis in trust,” according to a new report from the Commonwealth Fund’s recently convened Commission on a National Public Health System. “Too many Americans have lost faith in the health care system overall, and in their government’s ability to keep them healthy in particular.”
Just 55% of U.S. adults say they “trust public health institutions to manage a potential future pandemic based on how COVID-19 was handled, according to a recent Morning Consult survey.
“The trust has gone down, for sure, for public health institutions during this crisis and this experience,” said Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global health & HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It definitely presents an obstacle.”
