Memes, tweets, snark are the FDA’S new public health weapons

When Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed during a National Football League game in January, dozens of Twitter trolls quickly blamed it on COVID-19 shots.

“Snake-oil salesmen” seized on the event, said Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf in an interview. The #diedsuddenly hashtag, which appeared in tweets about the incident, is often used to discredit vaccines by linking them to deaths and injuries without evidence.

The FDA is treading a fine line between responding to misinformation on social media without amplifying it. After Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter

Inc. last year, the platform stopped enforcing a policy designed to suppress false or misleading information about the pandemic.

“Sometimes if you get into a dispute with people that are not telling the truth, it just magnifies the situation,” Califf said. “I think it’s better in this case to reinforce the truth and not get into a backand-forth argument with people that are peddling falsehoods.”

Since Califf took over a year ago, the FDA has set its sights on socialmedia disinformation as a public-health scourge. The agency’s efforts started with some savvy responses to pandemic misinformation cropping up on Twitter. Now a crew of agency employees creates memes and other content and feeds them into the internet to defend science.

“Historically, the FDA has been able to put out a statement that would be transmitted to doctors, the medical establishment, and then the patients,” Califf said. “We’re now in an era where FDA puts out a statement, and then there’s 24-by-7 alternative information that needs to be dealt with.”

As old as medicine itself, misinformation and unscientific treatments have been supercharged by the immediacy of the internet, and the toll has been significant. Compared with nurses and doctors who are trusted by at least two-thirds of the public, U.S. health agencies enjoy relatively low levels of confidence, according to a 2021 Harvard School of Public Health poll.

Just 52% of Americans surveyed said they trust the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s health recommendations; for the FDA it was just

37%.

Under pressure to counter unproven pandemic theories — including laboratory leaks and hydroxychloroquine cures — and stung by allegations that they approved COVID-19 vaccines too fast, the FDA took its fight to social media. Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter are increasingly where Americans get their news.

The learning curve was steep. When the agency warned about a Tiktok video showing chicken breasts marinated and cooked in Procter & Gamble Co.’s Nyquil cold medication, critics said the FDA only drew more attention to the trend.