The Tribune

“Infodemic: An excessive amount of information about a problem that is typically unreliable, spreads rapidly, and makes a solution more difficult to achieve.”

With human tragedies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, there are those willing, often happily, to exploit human frailty, fear, anxiety and ignorance. Misinformation, disinformation and lies are fashioned into powerful munitions by those who aggressively stoke panic and hysteria for political, financial and other gain.

Some political leaders denied the seriousness of the pandemic. Some played games over restrictive measures for political reasons. Charlatans have sold fake remedies to rake in profits. Irresponsible religionists have claimed vaccines are the mark of the beast or balked at necessary public health measures for private gain.

Rabid anti-vaxxers have offered a tsunami of ridiculous and obviously false and doctored claims about the virus, its variants and vaccines.

Sadly, there are now millions of sick or dead victims of such manipulation and exploitation. As noted by one observer in the paraphrasing of a classic insight: “In pandemics, as in war, truth is often the first casualty.”

Cordell Hull, the longest-serving US Secretary of State, who served under Franklin Roosevelt for 11 years and who also helped to found the United Nations, paraphrased an old adage: “A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.”

Such lies rapidly penetrate cyberspace and every continent before truth has an opportunity to have its morning tea or coffee and certainly before the truth can educate and inform those already infected by pernicious and deadly untruths on everything from vaccines to the outcome of elections, to vicious claims about ethnic and other minority groups, to climate change denialism.

Mass misinformation, like viral pathogens, have accompanied pandemics from the Antonine smallpox plague of 165-180 A.D. in Rome to Europe’s Black Death, to the 1918 Flu Pandemic, to COVID-19. During the Black Death, Jews were scapegoated and massacred because of fake news about them poisoning wells.

The difference today, as noted by social psychologist Sander van der Linden, is that: “Technology enables the spread of misinformation in a way that wasn’t possible before.”

As reported at Frontiers in Public Health: “COVID-19 has been referred to as a ‘digital pandemic’ due to the multitude of information in various forms that have been circulated since it got first detected…”

More than three billion people are regularly on social media for endless hours every day. It is now the primary information source of communication and information for most of those on these platforms.

More Bahamians get their information from WhatsApp and Facebook. Most Bahamians, especially those under a certain age, do not read newspapers, watch television news nor search for accurate news from reliable sources online.

We all know friends and associates who endlessly forward fake information on the disease, believing such information is true, basing life and death decisions, including getting vaccinated, on non-credible and often dangerous sources.

Many people continue to believe false claims and stories even after they are debunked, including through daily barrages of “myth, rumours, pseudoscience or altered facts”, which many believe, strenuously refusing to seek out other information.

Fake claims

As observed by the Brookings Institution: “Widespread panic, especially when it involves a disease with unknown and lethal consequences, lends itself perfectly to fringe notions reinforcing already-held world views, producing what the World Health Organization recently termed an “infoepidemic”.

The tragic antidote to this fake information on COVID will be a personal health scare or the death of a loved one. A news story on a US network on Tuesday night told the story of two brothers.

One of the brothers barely survived COVID-19. His brother, 60, who had similarly refused to be vaccinated because of fake news circulated by others, left his brother’s hospital bed and rushed to a Walgreens to be vaccinated immediately.

One hospital in the UK got a letter from a former patient who recovered from the many effects of the virus. He wrote about his fake claims and false suppositions about the disease: “I wish I could take back everything I believed and everything I said about this.”

A dear friend recalls being in a bank line at home and overhearing an exchange about an upcoming lunar eclipse. One gentleman asked a friend, “Are you going to watch the eclipse?” The response: “I don’t bother with those demonic things!”

A natural occurrence, explicable through science, was in this worldview caused by an evil force. The mindset is Medieval, something some may have believed in the fifth to fifteenth centuries or in a much earlier period in human history.

Years ago, a letter to the editor in a local journal condemned the various obelisks found at public monuments on New Providence such as at the Cenotaph in downtown Nassau.

The monument, located in the Garden of Remembrance, pays tribute to those military men and women who lost their lives on behalf of their country but is deemed by some conspiracists as something dark and nefarious.

Much of the world and many Bahamians engage in magical thinking fuelled by a lack of basic appreciation for science and the scientific method.

This method is classically defined as: “a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” It is a method based on the gathering of tested facts.

Many people in the world do not understand basic science, including what is a virus, a germ or a vaccine. In place of this is typically a jumble of superstition, easily exploited and morphing into an ant-scientific mindset and often fuelled by fundamentalism.

Science

What percentage of Bahamians actually believe or appreciate the basic constructs of evolutionary science? This lack of basic scientific knowledge is linked to health illiteracy. The Lancet noted in an editorial: “Referred to as the silent epidemic, health illiteracy is the inability to comprehend and use medical information that can affect access to and use of the health-care system.”

Many are dying or becoming gravely ill because of a lack of understanding of basic medical and scientific facts.

A late aunt of an acquaintance used to tell the latter that God was in charge of when she died. The aunt was obese, never exercised and ate poorly. A predestination worldview is often an excuse for not making good decisions on health matters.

A grave lack of understanding of viruses, vaccines and measures to protect and to preserve life, is leading to mass death around the world. This is a part of the great and sad tragedy of COVID-19. Millions are suffering and dying needlessly, including loved ones here in The Bahamas.

A mother on television in a southern US state, who was vaccinated, could not convince her son, the great love of her life, who suffered from obesity, to get vaccinated. She recently buried him. Some are using the funerals of loved ones as venues to get others vaccinated.

In numerous stories here at home and in global media reports, vaccine hesitancy by those who have fallen ill from SARS-COV-2 has become regret by those who previously refused to take a vaccine for a complex of reasons, including a host of fears.

A relative recites the regret of a colleague in her 60s who, in Bahamianese, “stenched” in getting vaccinated because of the many WhatsApp and Facebook posts she digested laced with arsenic-like bogus claims about the danger of vaccines.

After contracting COVID and becoming quite ill, she is now determined to get vaccinated.

Told lies

Around the world, many people now realize they were lied to by those who downplayed the dangers of the SARS-COV-2 virus and the COVID-19 disease, with potential long-term physical and mental effects.

After battling the disease for weeks, 51-year-old Glenn Barratt recently died from COVID-19 in the United Kingdom. He had previously decided not to be vaccinated. His last words to his bedside nurse on the vaccine: “I wish I had.”

In this phase of the pandemic, with many now personally experiencing the reality of the disease in real time and not through fake information and falsehoods spread through various platforms, we are in a season of sadness, dying and regret.

Hopefully, more people will respond to their loved ones and to credible sources and get vaccinated in order to save their lives. As more people are vaccinated, the SARS-COV-2 virus and it variants, which can become deadlier and more pernicious, will ruthlessly exploit the unvaccinated with greater lethal force than viral fake memes.