World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for governments to reduce the spread of so-called “misinformation” during the recent World Health Summit.
“Strong partnerships – like strong relationships – are built on trust,” he said. “Trust has always been the foundation of medicine and public health. Trust itself does not make people healthy; but no one can be healthy without trust.”
The WHO chief described that “trust” can be broken because “people receive the wrong information.”
The spread of “wrong information” has been “turbo charged” from social media platforms,” Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, noting that quickly-disseminated information “contributed to mistrust in vaccines and other health interventions, fuelled stigma and discrimination, and even led to violence against health workers and marginalized groups.”
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, falsehoods about masks, vaccines and ‘lockdowns’ spread as fast as the virus itself, and were almost as deadly,” he continued. “Just as mis- and disinformation undermined the response to the pandemic itself, so it continues to undermine negotiations on the WHO Pandemic Agreement.”
The WHO director-general proceeded to deny claims that its “Pandemic Agreement” would “cede national sovereignty to WHO and give it the power to impose ‘lockdowns’ or vaccine mandates on countries.”
“As you know, these claims are, of course, entirely false,” he said. “Sovereign governments are negotiating the agreement; and sovereign governments will implement it, in accordance with their own national laws.”
Emphasizing that “governments and internet and social media companies have a responsibility to prevent the spread of harmful lies and promote access to accurate health information,” the WHO chief said that the entity is “working with a range of companies and researchers and partners to understand how misinformation and disinformation spreads, who is targeted, how they’re influenced, and what we can do to counter this problem.”
“Everything we do depends on the trust of the communities we serve, the partners with whom we work, and the Member States who set the global health agenda, and entrust us with the resources to deliver it,” he added.
The WHO leader previously called for greater pushback against those who did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
“The serious challenge that’s posed by anti-vaxxers and I think we need to strategize to really push back because vaccines work, vaccines affect adults and we have science, evidence on our side,” he said. “I think it’s time to be more aggressive in pushing back on anti-vaxxers.”
