A very good summary of where we are, where we've been and where we are going from Professor Devi Sridhar with some relevant thoughts on the misinformation....
www.medscape.com/viewarticle/947382#vp_6
The second thing is bots — accounts or people who spread misinformation. Eric knows this, being on Twitter. There is a vast amount of disinformation being spread and videos being created by people who just call themselves "professor." They're not even professors. They just call themselves "professor" on their Twitter handle, and they give themselves a PhD credential, and then they're putting up YouTube videos that are being seen in India. People aren't taking vaccines because they said, "I saw some professor." I'm like, at what university? They say, "We don't know; he calls himself 'professor.'" It's amazing to watch.....
........Nobody seems to want to ever move in academia. I think it's the egos and the need to be right. In the States there's a great example — I don't want to mention anyone by name, but from some of the classic institutions like Stanford, Harvard — professors coming out with things that actually are not evidence based. It's astonishing that they're not willing to say at some point, "I got that wrong, I'm willing to move."
Instead, they just keep digging themselves into a deeper and deeper pit. That's been astonishing. I think there are three sources: the academics who just refuse to move because of their egos; the bots and fake pseudocelebrity accounts pretending to be professors; and then, of course, the leaders who just are populist and not in tune with actual science.
I've really struggled because you can't fight every single one of them; there are too many. You end up being consumed in the mud. How do you stay out of the mud of where anything you say, someone says something the opposite of it?
The third thing that's been really difficult is academics who are real academics, but who stuck their heels in very early to their position and refused to move.
Last January or February some academics came out and said things like, most of the population has already had it, or it was pre-existing immunity, or it's not as bad as we think it is. They have not moved. The world has moved. We have evidence. I really admire people who will say, "We thought the infection fatality rate was much less. It's higher than we thought. We reevaluated our position."