The emergence of Covid-19 revealed the limits of people’s very different and even opposing ways of thinking. We know that every head is a world, but after the emergence of the pandemic, the worlds were filled with fears, uncertainty, pain, loss, etc., causing our thinking around COVID-19 to turn one way or the other.
Our thinking is determined based on our experiences and knowledge of the subject. Therefore, when discussing a new situation with little reliable information, the theories, orientations, and beliefs related to COVID-19 were many. The scarce available information caused people to start spreading false or modified data to get more people to share their thoughts regarding COVID-19 and the measures taken to deal with it.
The internet flooded with misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 issue in a short period. Many COVID-19 vaccine opposition groups arose posting and sharing modified or altered statistical data, such as the misrepresented and misleading interpretation of the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures of children vaccinated against COVID-19 in England between January and October 2021. The publication claimed that the ONS had stated that vaccinated children were 52 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those who did not receive it. Another case was the social media posts about athletes who had sudden deaths in the six months after receiving the vaccine.
However, most of the time a misinformation publication arises, professionals and experts in the topic come out to clear the situations, as did Jonathan Drezner, MD (UW Medicine Center for Sports Cardiology, Seattle), editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, who declared:
“I think those links are completely false information, many of those cases have other diagnosed conditions and even occurred before the pandemic started—so there’s nothing to this.”
There will always be a risk that the information we get is misinformation. We can find hundreds more examples like those mentioned above. That is why it is essential to critically evaluate the data we see, read, and listen to before we believe it is accurate and before sharing that information with hundreds of people more. Identifying, investigating, and analyzing are great keys to stopping misinformation.
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