The Rise of Misinformation and Pseudoscience

Earlier in August, the Coronavirus Blog covered troubling research on the Covid-19 misinformation epidemic, showing that over 2,000 false claims about the disease were in circulation worldwide. Now, as the New York Times reports, the effects of misinformation are being observed in doctor’s offices. People are getting sick and seeking medical help because they are acting on misinformed beliefs, like the false ideas that drinking bleach or highly concentrated alcohol could cure the coronavirus. “This is a statistically significant pattern that we can observe in a large survey,”…