Belief in misinformation about key health issues persists among a good chunk of adults, with false claims about COVID-19, vaccines and reproductive health garnering a substantial amount of support, a new poll from KFF has found.
Whether or not they believed the claims, nearly all participants in the survey were aware of the misinformation with 96 percent saying they had heard at least one of the 10 claims presented to them. The most widespread misinformation claims had to do with COVID-19 and vaccines.
The new polling data found that a third of adults believed the COVID-19 vaccines “caused thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people,” with 10 percent believing that claim to be “definitely true” and 23 percent saying it was “probably true.” Another 34 percent said it was “probably false” and 31 percent said that claim was “definitely false.”
Nearly a third of people also said they believed the parasitic deworming medication ivermectin was an “effective treatment for COVID-19.” Among the naysayers, 44 percent said that claim was “probably false” and 22 percent said it was “definitely false.”
Health experts and clinicians have repeated stressed that there is no evidence that ivermectin has any efficacy in treating or preventing COVID-19 infections, and the Food and Drug Administration has never authorized the drug for use in treating the coronavirus.
In the same poll, roughly a quarter of people said they believed vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella caused autism in children and that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility. No evidence has so far been found to indicate that immunization against SARS-CoV-2 affects male or female fertility.
The claims that vaccines cause autism have long been refuted. Several studies, including one in Sweden published in 2020 that followed children exposed to flu vaccinations for several years, have found no link between vaccinations and autism.
The British physician Andrew Wakefield who originated the claim has since been barred from practicing medicine in the U.K. and the 1998 study he conducted that linked autism to vaccinations has since been deemed fraudulent.
Regarding reproductive health, about a third of survey participants said they believed sex education would lead to teens being more sexually active and also that birth control the pill or IUDs make it harder for women to get pregnant after they stop using those methods.
Larger shares of participants believed in misinformation having to do with gun violence when compared to the other issues, with 60 percent saying they believed “armed school police guards have been proven to prevent school shootings.”
A 2021 analysis of 133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019 found that armed school police officers — who were present in nearly a quarter of school shootings included in the study — were not associated with a significant reduction in gun injuries.
Another 42 percent said they believed people who have firearms in their homes are less likely to be killed by a gun than people without guns at home. In fact, the opposite has been observed, with a 2022 analysis of California adults from 2004 to 2016 finding that overall homicide rates were more than two times higher among people who lived with gun owners than those who didn’t.[the original study didn't control for income, which is fucking lib]
While these results indicate a sizeable minority of adults believe in disproven claims about health, KFF noted that the rate of people who believe them to be “definitely true” was small overall. The majority people fell in what the organization referred to as the “malleable middle,” who were unsure about most of the claims presented to them.
KFF found that certain groups were more susceptible to misinformation than others, including those with lower levels of educational attainment, those who identify as Republican as well as Black and Hispanic adults.
The findings came from the KFF Health Misinformation Tracking Poll Pilot that was conducted from May 23 to June 12. Pollsters included 2,007 adults in the survey and the results have a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
I dropped dead about an hour after I got vaxxed, so I think that says a lot.
I can’t stress enough that people spreading anti-vax shit should’ve been either legally prosecuted or shadily disappeared
You remove the stuff they post and send them accurate information. The ones who keep spreading shit get prosecuted, the same way Holocaust deniers in Germany can be prosecuted.
can't agree enough, a functional society wouldn't allow people to spread lies that are going to get people killed
Look all I'm saying is that if we're going to have death squads anyway, they could at least target chuds.
So the fight to get people to understand long COVID is yet even more difficult.
60+% of Americans believe voting makes a difference. I'm kinda surprised the number believing covid lies isn't higher.
I know a lot of old conservatives that are confusing alcoholism induced heart issues with vaccine symptoms.
It's difficult to even get through to people about vaccine information. Just the other day someone I work with was going off about how they "proved ivermectin actually does work for COVID" and it's like, why bother engaging at all? I'm not going to change his mind, it's rotted.
I feel like we're in a post discourse society. People don't argue shit anymore. I feel like, in 2015, people would be writing pages of FB comments going off on this shit.
yeah at a certain point all you can do is say "show me the study" and they'll just say "uh look it up it's true" and you can be like "no it's not, i've seen countless people claim that and they never have evidence that's rigorous and indicates what they're claiming" and they'll just tell you to do your own research again.
or more likely they'll be like "my cousin got the vaccine and then they died" and you can say that they're wrong and that didn't happen but you don't have access to the medical records so as far as they're concerned you know just as much as they do.
And even when you do provide evidence, they will wave it away with a "those scientists are part of the cabal" or "that was paid for by big pharma" and ignore the data entirely.
I remember when the ivermectin shit was going around, it was legitimately too foolish to warrant a response. I think I ended up just telling them that they're taking cow/horse meds and sending them Doja cats I'm a cow I go moo song lol.
60 percent saying they believed “armed school police guards have been proven to prevent school shootings.”
Do people literally not know what it means to prove something?
60 percent saying they believed “armed school police guards have been proven to prevent school shootings.
Y'all heard of Uvalde?
Was this another landline survey conducted exclusively with ancient people who have a landline, actually pick it up, and then take the survey instead of immediately hanging up?
this type of shit is the symptom of letting powerful people do bad and never face consequences. when the people appointed to run agencies by corrupt assholes never face justice for their actions, as the hollowing out of our institutions is normalized by privatization/neoliberalism/deregulation schemes and power is continuously vested in private interests, the trust of people in institutions erodes because ultimately it's the reputation being stripped as an asset and converted into cash for a cluster of well-placed assholes.
the lib response to symptoms like this is to declare that people are stupid and then basically do nothing about it, because there is never a material cause underlying any of this in their eyes. "whatever happened to people understanding science?" look at our public schools: standardized testing tied to austerity happened. people were falling all over themselves in the 40s to get their kids the polio vaccine. look at our public health infrastructure: who the fuck can afford to have a casual conversation with a trusted family physician? absolutely incredible how Biden is "most progressive president since FDR" while absolutely terminating any more discussion of universal healthcare, despite it being an explicit plank of the party platform. remember that? then a goddamn pandemic happened and it's all "we love our pharmaceutical companies and their proprietary medicines!"
i get vaccines because i understand what's behind how they work and have a working understanding of history. same reason i think flouride in the drinking water is 👍 . if they slip one by me with 5G nanobots to make me gay or whatever, i can live with it. but i get why people who received a shit tier education and have limited exposure to healthcare just flat out don't trust the messaging of government agencies, because it's pretty clear many of our institutions do not care if millions of regular people die to make some people rich. the pandemic showed all of us that. we can't expect people who have been unsupported/underserved by social institutions and subjected to their social murder believe anything they say.
and yes, in a real country, the state should absolutely come down hard on the business of public health misinformation and absolutely destroy those people publicly.
only 22% of this country knows for certain that horse dewormer doesn’t get rid of covid
I know some chuds and new age crystal types who are claiming their vaccine causes amnesia. That's been the weirdest one.
Memory loss is a symptom of long covid, so I can definitely see them looking at someone suffering from that and blaming literally the exact wrong thing for it.
Honestly, it's not unreasonable to believe thousands of deaths were caused by the Covid vaccine since 13.42 billion doses have been given. The odds would be slightly lower than someone having a life-threatening reaction to the flu vaccine because they're severely allergic to eggs. It would be on par with the health professional improperly giving the vaccine setting off a freak series of events that culminated in the person's death. Thousands of deaths caused by something that has been administered tens of billions of times is rounding error.
This is one of those things where the respondents are obviously wrong about something, but because they're so terrible at understanding what orders of magnitudes are, they wind up giving a not unreasonable answer. Now, the implication of their belief (thousands of healthy and young people dying means there's millions of old people dying) is something that must be ruthlessly combated.
it's just cope. certainly easier to think that every institution was defeated by a cabal of reptilian financiers through complicated subterfuge and not that our carved out institutions were no match for an unthinking, unyielding, barely living thing that only insists on its own reproduction which spontaneously came about. the latter requires reconciling with the fact that every institution is impotent against every upcoming global warming crisis which demand incredible unprecendented change at nearly every level. the former only requires some sort of heroic strongman figure to vanquish evil.
