The number of people using tobacco has not declined for nearly a decade, causing almost eight million death worldwide every year. Yet despite the lack of progress, official bodies and posters on social media channels continue to push back against THR with inadequate and flawed scientific research.
Health misinformation is impacting inappropriate responses by governments and public health institutions at every level. Moreover, the public is seriously misinformed on many areas of protecting their health by the massive spreading of fake news and misleading information, whilst reliable scientific information is lost in cyberspace.
As clearly happening with the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, misinterpretation of scientific data is driving millions of people towards irrational decisions.
People who are spreading misinformation are often unaware that they are doing so. On the other hand, disinformation is the coordinated spread of deceiving information by actors with different agendas in a specific area.
According to the research from Harvard University, “Establishing the Truth: Vaccines, Social Media, and the Spread of Misinformation” among the 80% of people who look for health information online, a high percentage cannot distinguish between misinformation and valid scientific evidence in the news they read.
“We always had writers and journalists as critical gatekeepers who were able to filter some of this information. But now, because of social media, we do not have this very critical intermediary,” states Vish Viswanath, author of the research and director of the Applied Risk Communication for the 21st Century program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Currently, social media platforms are the main channels people access for news on health. Unlike “traditional” news sources, their contact is not vetted. Media outlets have lost the authority they have had historically.
As underlined by Dutch microbiologist Elisabeth Bik in an interview with The Guardian: “the danger with social media is that even a mediocre or bad or flawed paper can be taken by people who have different agendas and brought into the spotlight and celebrated as the new truth.”
The predominance of mediocre and even flawed studies has been the situation for years in the field of Tobacco Harm Reduction. Scientific evidence on alternative less-harmful products has been fiercely contested by conservatives in national health institutions and international regulatory bodies, effectively thwarting any attempts to embrace new nicotine products, e-cigarettes in particular, as a smoking cessation tool.
The number of people using tobacco has not declined for nearly a decade, causing almost eight million death worldwide every year. Yet despite the lack of progress, official bodies and posters on social media channels continue to push back against THR with inadequate and flawed scientific research.
“Research with poor methodology and not replicable but more appealing in terms of contents are shared more by official media and social media channels,” says Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioural economics based on his research published in the article”Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones.”
Millions of people who smoke could improve their health or even save their lives if they had information on the THR potential of vaping and other non-combustible nicotine products. For Tobacco Harm Reduction, the impact of poor or flawed research studies published in prestigious journals affects the validity of the health guidance given to cigarette users.
In recent years campaigns of disinformation and millions of dollars have been poured into national health regulatory bodies and public institutions by private foundations to contest Tobacco Harm Reduction. Through their efforts, they have taken away the right to an informed choice for millions of people who smoke, including those in the Low and Middle Income countries.
“The public has the right to accurate information to make individual decisions that could save their life,” stressed Prof. Riccardo Polosa, founder of the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction (CoEHAR) and international scientist on Tobacco Harm Reduction.
“It is time to rethink the entire approach on scientific information to finally create a direct channel between science and the public to avoid distortions that potentially claims millions of lives,” said Prof Polosa.
So long, as the information about alternative nicotine delivery products continues to follow agendas based on bias and political interests instead of science and scientific research, this tragic state of affairs will continue, denying the benefits that could be achieved with new and reasonable approaches to curbing the tobacco epidemic, particularly in the nations where THR is needed the most.
