Healthline: The big business of medical misinformation

The spread of medical misinformation is not a new social issue. Peddlers were selling snake oil long before our time. Modern media, however, has given rise to an invisible traveling salesman and medical misinformation gets peddled faster now at 5G.

Researcher Jeffrey Blevins, head of UC’s Department of Journalism, studies misinformation on social media platforms and was featured in a Healthline article that looks at how medical misinformation spreads.

“We really have a knowledge crisis in this country,” Blevins states in the article, referring to the early days of the pandemic and how medication falsehoods were taken as truths. The Healthline article points to recent research led by Blevins that focused on whose voices were the strongest in promoting the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. 

Read the Healthline article  

Featured image at top of Jeffrey Blevins. Photo/Colleen Kelly/UC Creative + Brand.