The Top Threat To Americans’ Health Is Not A Virus. It’s Disinformation

Forbes
Over the past 120 years, we’ve developed countermeasures to reduce or nearly eliminate many diseases that decimated humanity for millennia. Now, on the fourth anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, medical disinformation threatens to undo this progress.

In the 20th century, the average life expectancy of Americans increased by 30 years; 25 of them were due to public health. Vaccines played a major role, but other advances helped. Adding folate to foods dramatically reduced neural tube defects in newborns. Safer cars and better roadways cut fatal crashes per mile traveled by 90%. A multipronged campaign to discourage smoking spared 8 million Americans early deaths from cancer, heart disease and emphysema.

Unfortunately, we became a victim of our own success. The public, freed from the daily fear that they might lose a child to measles, meningitis or other vaccine-preventable diseases, grew complacent. So did public health. Neither was prepared for what happened next. MORE