Before the pandemic, the AMA implored social media companies to address misinformation about vaccines online. In April, the group also called called on elected leaders to “affirm science, evidence and fact.”
That hasn’t happened, and one of the big reasons is Trump. The Cornell Alliance for Science identified the president as the “largest driver” of Covid-19 misinformation in a recent analysis of 38 million articles. Trump’s falsehoods on Covid include saying repeatedly that it will go away, promoting the malaria drug that turned out to have harmful side effects, suggesting a vaccine would be ready by November, and accusing federal health agencies of an agenda to sabotage his re-election campaign.
In response to rising misinformation about the pandemic, Bhatti joined with other physicians to form a group called Doctors Organized to Communicate Science. It’s a project of the Committee to Protect Medicare, a political group that has opposed Trump with ad spending. (Bhatti also testified in defense of the Affordable Care Act on Oct. 15 at the Senate confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.)
Bhatti said the DOCS group is a nonpartisan spinoff dedicated “to provide facts based on science, just nonpartisan hard facts.”
Bhatti’s nonprofit clinic, called Care Free Medical, is about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from where armed men protested shutdown orders this past spring inside Michigan state capitol building.
Cars heading to the statehouse that day lined Saginaw Street. Bhatti said protesters showed up at the district office of the local Democratic congresswoman, which is in the same office building as Care Free Medical, and harassed some patients going into the clinic.
“They had the largest megaphone that day,” he said. He doesn’t think the armed opponents of the state’s stay-at-home order represented mainstream sentiment. But every day he encounters people who either believe misinformation about the virus or have at least been influenced by it. “I’ve had patients flat-out look me in the face and tell me this whole thing is a hoax,” he said.
One patient who spurned masks early in the pandemic got Covid and suffered shortness of breath for two months, Bhatti said. Her grandmother also got the virus and died from it. Later she told him that she wished she’d taken it more seriously and worn a mask.
When Trump said he was taking the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure, Bhatti had to turn down patients who asked for it. “I was the villain for not giving them a medicine,” he said. The drug was briefly evaluated as a potential therapy, but the Food and Drug Administration revoked its authorization after finding no benefit and possible harm.
Bhatti also fears that patients won’t take an eventual coronavirus vaccine if one of the experimental shots now in trials is approved. Only half of Americans in a recent Gallup survey said they would be willing to take an FDA-approved vaccine if one were available right now, down 11 percentage points from August.
While Bhatti says many of the misconceptions he battles are most prevalent among his patients who support Trump, distrust of vaccines is bipartisan. Some patients on the right entertain conspiracy theories about Bill Gates’s involvement in the vaccine effort, and others on the left don’t trust Big Pharma.
He hopes to persuade all his patients to trust the science. But the resistance he encounters takes a toll.
“It’s really hard to not take it personally,” he said. “They’re telling you that they trust you to manage their insulin, but they don’t trust you to give good health advice as it pertains to Covid.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.