Belief in misinformation about key health issues persists among a good chunk of adults, with false claims about COVID-19, vaccines and reproductive health garnering a substantial amount of support, a new poll from KFF has found.
Whether or not they believed the claims, nearly all participants in the survey were aware of the misinformation with 96 percent saying they had heard at least one of the 10 claims presented to them. The most widespread misinformation claims had to do with COVID-19 and vaccines.
The new polling data found that a third of adults believed the COVID-19 vaccines “caused thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people,” with 10 percent believing that claim to be “definitely true” and 23 percent saying it was “probably true.” Another 34 percent said it was “probably false” and 31 percent said that claim was “definitely false.”
Nearly a third of people also said they believed the parasitic deworming medication ivermectin was an “effective treatment for COVID-19.” Among the naysayers, 44 percent said that claim was “probably false” and 22 percent said it was “definitely false.”
Health experts and clinicians have repeated stressed that there is no evidence that ivermectin has any efficacy in treating or preventing COVID-19 infections, and the Food and Drug Administration has never authorized the drug for use in treating the coronavirus.
In the same poll, roughly a quarter of people said they believed vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella caused autism in children and that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility. No evidence has so far been found to indicate that immunization against SARS-CoV-2 affects male or female fertility.
The claims that vaccines cause autism have long been refuted. Several studies, including one in Sweden published in 2020 that followed children exposed to flu vaccinations for several years, have found no link between vaccinations and autism.
The British physician Andrew Wakefield who originated the claim has since been barred from practicing medicine in the U.K. and the 1998 study he conducted that linked autism to vaccinations has since been deemed fraudulent.
Regarding reproductive health, about a third of survey participants said they believed sex education would lead to teens being more sexually active and also that birth control the pill or IUDs make it harder for women to get pregnant after they stop using those methods.
Larger shares of participants believed in misinformation having to do with gun violence when compared to the other issues, with 60 percent saying they believed “armed school police guards have been proven to prevent school shootings.”
A 2021 analysis of 133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019 found that armed school police officers — who were present in nearly a quarter of school shootings included in the study — were not associated with a significant reduction in gun injuries.
Another 42 percent said they believed people who have firearms in their homes are less likely to be killed by a gun than people without guns at home. In fact, the opposite has been observed, with a 2022 analysis of California adults from 2004 to 2016 finding that overall homicide rates were more than two times higher among people who lived with gun owners than those who didn’t.[the original study didn’t control for income, which is fucking lib]
While these results indicate a sizeable minority of adults believe in disproven claims about health, KFF noted that the rate of people who believe them to be “definitely true” was small overall. The majority people fell in what the organization referred to as the “malleable middle,” who were unsure about most of the claims presented to them.
KFF found that certain groups were more susceptible to misinformation than others, including those with lower levels of educational attainment, those who identify as Republican as well as Black and Hispanic adults.
The findings came from the KFF Health Misinformation Tracking Poll Pilot that was conducted from May 23 to June 12. Pollsters included 2,007 adults in the survey and the results have a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
this type of shit is the symptom of letting powerful people do bad and never face consequences. when the people appointed to run agencies by corrupt assholes never face justice for their actions, as the hollowing out of our institutions is normalized by privatization/neoliberalism/deregulation schemes and power is continuously vested in private interests, the trust of people in institutions erodes because ultimately it’s the reputation being stripped as an asset and converted into cash for a cluster of well-placed assholes.
the lib response to symptoms like this is to declare that people are stupid and then basically do nothing about it, because there is never a material cause underlying any of this in their eyes. “whatever happened to people understanding science?” look at our public schools: standardized testing tied to austerity happened. people were falling all over themselves in the 40s to get their kids the polio vaccine. look at our public health infrastructure: who the fuck can afford to have a casual conversation with a trusted family physician? absolutely incredible how Biden is “most progressive president since FDR” while absolutely terminating any more discussion of universal healthcare, despite it being an explicit plank of the party platform. remember that? then a goddamn pandemic happened and it’s all “we love our pharmaceutical companies and their proprietary medicines!”
i get vaccines because i understand what’s behind how they work and have a working understanding of history. same reason i think flouride in the drinking water is 👍 . if they slip one by me with 5G nanobots to make me gay or whatever, i can live with it. but i get why people who received a shit tier education and have limited exposure to healthcare just flat out don’t trust the messaging of government agencies, because it’s pretty clear many of our institutions do not care if millions of regular people die to make some people rich. the pandemic showed all of us that. we can’t expect people who have been unsupported/underserved by social institutions and subjected to their social murder believe anything they say.
and yes, in a real country, the state should absolutely come down hard on the business of public health misinformation and absolutely destroy those people publicly.