As of December 2019, almost three years ago, the Covid-19 pandemic quickly caused 6 million deaths worldwide in the following months, with more than 1 million in the United States and 600,000 in Brazil.
A group of public health experts from American universities studied the reasons for the refusal of preventive measures by part of the American population that led to the high number of deaths.
Led by Andrea Gurmakin Levy, they report in the Jama Network Open survey of 1,733 adults on adherence to pandemic control measures.
Many participants believed that Covid-19 was not real, others denied the need to remain in quarantine and 55% of them hid their symptoms at the beginning of the pandemic.
For the authors, greater disbelief in science has been a factor associated with non-adherence to health behaviors, such as the use of a face mask when it was indicated and vaccination, currently available to the Brazilian population by imposition of the Brazilian population itself.
Also Dhruv Kultar, from Weill Cornel Medical College, New York, analyzes the relationship of social media with medical disinformation.
He claims that the spread of unproven treatments on social media has contributed to the refusal of harm reduction measures in the epidemic and the high rates of hesitation or refusal in relation to vaccines.
Among the factors contributing to the spread of medical disinformation are deepening political polarization, worsening economic inequality, declining trust in institutions, and fragmentation of the media ecosystem.
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