INFODEMICCOVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation and Disinformation Costs an Estimated $50 to $300 Million Each Day
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that false or misleading health-related information can dangerously undermine the response to a public health crisis. Misinformation and disinformation have contributed to reduced trust in medical professionals and public health responders, increased belief in false medical cures, politicized public health countermeasures aimed at curbing transmission of the disease, and increased loss of life.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that false or misleading health-related information can dangerously undermine the response to a public health crisis. These messages include the inadvertent spread of erroneous information (misinformation) or deliberately created and propagated false or misleading information (disinformation). Misinformation and disinformation have contributed to reduced trust in medical professionals and public health responders, increased belief in false medical cures, politicized public health countermeasures aimed at curbing transmission of the disease, and increased loss of life.
As a country, we do not yet have a trusted set of approaches for managing misinformation and disinformation or exact methods for monetizing the costs resulting from their spread. The challenge to assigning an exact, high-confidence monetary cost to them is the lack of detailed data available on this issue. To begin to fill this gap, we have developed an initial conservative estimate of the total monetized costs of one facet of this issue—the misinformation or disinformation-informed decision to not get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Studies establishing causality between voluntary nonvaccination and misinformation and disinformation are limited, and it is important to recognize that nonvaccination may not be necessarily caused by either, even though there is a significant correlation between believing misinformation and disinformation and not being vaccinated.(1) Many other factors—such as lack of access to care, preexisting distrust of the medical system, or instinctive hesitancy to take a novel treatment—can lead to nonvaccination, even in the absence of misinformation or disinformation. More research is needed to include these factors, but the estimate used in this analysis is that misinformation and disinformation cause between 5% and 30% of voluntary nonvaccination in the United States. This is based on experimental studies on misinformation that showed a 6 percentage point decrease in vaccination intent(2) and comparison of total numbers receiving influenza vaccines compared to those receiving COVID-19 vaccines. About 23% of people not vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 say they normally get an annual flu shot.(3) Even accounting for fear of novelty, it seems plausible that much of this difference is caused by misinformation and disinformation. As of early October 2021, about 22% of the US adult population,(4) or 43 million people, have chosen nonvaccination, so we estimate that between 2 and 12 million people are unvaccinated because of misinformation or disinformation.
