Around 3 in 10 Americans still believe ivermectin is an effective treatment for covid. What’s more, few place significant trust in any form of news media or official institution to accurately convey information about health topics, from covid treatments and vaccines to reproductive health issues, a new poll from KFF shows.
The confusion about what’s true — and who’s telling the truth — is of critical importance to public health, experts in political science said. “Misinformation leads to lives being lost and health problems not being resolved,” Bob Blendon, a professor emeritus of public health at Harvard, said in an interview. Blendon was not associated with the survey.
Such misinformed beliefs are strongly held by only a sliver of the population, according to a new KFF poll. Nearly a third of the 2,007 respondents said the dewormer ivermectin was definitely or probably an effective treatment for COVID-19. (It’s not: Numerous randomized controlled trials have found otherwise.) A mere 22% thought ivermectin was definitely ineffective.
A fifth thought it was definitely or probably true that the COVID-19 vaccine had killed more people than the virus itself. (Multiple studies, examining different data sets, have found lower death rates among recipients of the vaccine than among those who didn’t get the shot.)
But nearly half, 47%, thought that claim was definitely false.
Nevertheless, said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College who has spent years studying the transmission of false information, the prevalence of vaccine misinformation is “alarming.” And, while not necessarily resulting entirely from misinformation, 30% of respondents thought parents should not be required to vaccinate their children against measles, mumps, and rubella.
More than a third of respondents also thought using birth control such as intrauterine devices made it harder for most women to get pregnant once…
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