Fake news about Covid-19 can be as dangerous as the virus | John Naughton
On 15 February the director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, addressed the Munich Security conference. At that moment, there were 66,000 cases of Covid-19 in China, and only 505 in the rest of the world. So most of us were probably still assuming that this was predominately a Chinese problem. This view was not shared by the WHO director-general. He was also concerned about: the lack of urgency in the international community; the severe disruption in the market for personal protective equipment, which was putting health workers at risk; the levels of rumours and misinformation that were hampering the response; and the havoc the virus could wreak in countries with weaker health systems.
The part of his speech that made me sit up, though, was this: "We're not just fighting an epidemic; we're fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous." And if we don't tackle this, he went on, "we are headed down a dark path that leads nowhere but division and disharmony".
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