Former FDA Commissioner on Fighting Medical Misinformation

Let's go sort of the big picture, and then we'll s- get down to some specifics, including some of the things that you're doing.

Um, define misinformation for us w- in, in the context of what we're talking about with the public health and individual health.

It's useful, I believe, when we're studying it, to divide information into information that's reliable and truthful, information that's incorrect for any reason, most often just people didn't have it right or no one really knows the answer.

Then disinformation, which is information which is purposely put out there which is known to be incorrect or pretty much proven to be incorrect, that could be harmful to people.

Um, and then malinformation, which is very purposeful, destructive information put out, often by government adversaries, uh, as a form, really, of cyber warfare.

And these categories are all different.

Um, the terminology itself is controversial because, uh, particularly just in the broad misinformation category, it can be argued whether a piece of information is correct or not, and often experts will disagree.

So there is a lot of fuzziness there, and people can be highly offended.

On the other hand, if we act like this is not happening, I think we're making a big mistake.

Well, you and I have spent our careers trying to provide clinical people with reliable information to make clinical decisions.