The Risks of Misinformation and Health

The Pandemic Vaccines and E-Cigarettes: Online Health Misinformation

Increasingly, online advice has become to dominate people’s healthcare decisions, versus guidelines issued by professional medical and health government agencies. When vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and other serious childhood illnesses were issued in the 20th century, the question was not if a child should receive such vaccines but when. Similarly, when the Surgeon General categorically stated that smoking was hazardous to human health, people likewise accepted the need to quit, or, at minimum acknowledged that if they continued smoking, they were doing so in defiance of commonsense because they were addicted.

Today, this is no longer the case. When vaccines for COVID-19 were readily available to the public, many people combed websites of dubious authorship and looked for alternative sources of information. Some people refused to take the vaccines at all, because of side effects or complications they read about online, despite warnings from the CDC that the risks of contracting the illness were greater than the risks of taking vaccines. Although e-cigarettes still pose a risk to human health, many smokers defend their choice as healthy, based upon propaganda they read online by retailers themselves.

Both response to e-cigarettes and the pandemic vaccines are emblematic of an attempt for people to choose their own personal approaches to healthcare. While this can have some benefits, in terms of people educating themselves online about different health-related approaches, it can also lead people astray about the risks and benefits of health-related choices. In the case of e-cigarettes, choosing to smoke even these non-traditional types of cigarettes can still result in damage to their bodies. In the case of rejecting vaccines, this can result in people refusing preventative treatments that can significantly reduce the risk of complications from a serious disease. It is important that people learn how to read and process the quality of sources of health-related information online.