We are in a new information landscape, one that has immense benefits but also serious consequences. To adapt to the dense jungle of our information ecosystem, we must become responsible information consumers in ways we’ve never had to before. It’s hard but desperately needed for our health and our democracy.
(Your Local Epidemiologist)
In January 2025, a website styled as realcdc.org went live. It was an imitation CDC website right down to the graphics, but the information was different — on vaccines and autism, for example. Today, if you try to visit realcdc.org, your browser won’t be able to find the server because the site has now been pulled after being exposed as a fake. But here’s a link to a discussion of the faked CDC website, complete with screenshots comparing the knock-off version to cdc.gov.
“CDC Clone Site, Rife with False Vaccine Claims, Hosted by Group Previously Led by HHS Secretary,”
https://infoepi.substack.com/p/cdc-clone-site-rife-with-false-vaccine
Following its posting and subsequent removal, we’re sending this brief note on how we might discern between dubious and reliable health information. Readers can draw their own conclusions about what’s fake and what’s real or, more precisely, what’s specious and what’s sound. But as we all try to navigate an ever more challenging health-information landscape, epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina and Journalist Isaac Saul, writing at Your Local Epidemiologist, offer valuable tips for telling the difference between questionable claims and ones backed by the results of well-designed and executed research. We want to pass those along.
“9 ways to spot falsehoods,”
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/9-ways-to-spot-falsehoods?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
My co-authors and I watched how medical misinformation gained traction during the COVID pandemic, when humanity was learning in real time its new microbial enemy and how to fight it:
Amid the scramble to find treatments that worked against COVID and with disinformation driving doubt in vaccines and modern medicine, misinformation about various possible cures was sure to follow. As the coronavirus pandemic spread in 2020, a massive research effort began to determine what treatments might work against SARS-CoV-2. Hundreds of existing medications were tested in the hope that some relatively inexpensive and common drugs might turn out to be effective treatments. Some, including doctors, latched onto early hopeful observations about treatments by doctors on the front lines, along with hopeful results from initial studies that were not adequately well designed to afford definitive answers. But when results of rigorously designed and executed research studies did not confirm early hopes, what people wanted to believe tended to blind them to what turned out to be true, and they did not get the update.
(The Fed and the Flu: Parsing Pandemic Economic Shocks, p. 353.)
We saw during COVID that healthcare misinformation comes with human and economic costs that scale up with both the pervasiveness of the misinformation and the severity of the pandemic. That happens, of course, only when there’s better actionable information to be had that could mitigate a pandemic’s worst outcomes. For many of the pandemics humanity has faced, of course, people didn’t have that. Modern medicine provides impactful choices our ancestors just didn’t have.
Medical misinformation exacts a cost beyond pandemic events, too, in the form of more illness, lost productivity, higher healthcare costs, less discretionary spending beyond the medical sphere, and sometimes lost health or lost life years and the economic impacts that derive from those. Those are consequences we are reckoning with now.
We wish readers good health, which depends in part on good information. We anticipate publishing an update about measles this Sunday. Stay tuned.
