As Medical Falsehoods Persist, Concerns About Future Pandemic Readiness Grow

Why should nephrologists care about preventing the next pandemic? That was the question posed by the moderator of a panel discussion Thursday morning that kicked off Kidney Week 2022, after Peter J. Hotez, MD, PhD, spoke about how the spread of antiscience beliefs in America jeopardizes public health.

Kidney Week, which runs through Sunday, is taking place in Florida, where the state surgeon general previously touted unapproved COVID-19 treatments and has made statements about COVID-19 vaccinations that are not supported by science.

Carlos del Rio, MD, a distinguished professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Emory University School of Medicine, asked Hotez and the other panelists to elaborate on what can be done to fight this growing issue.

Hotez, the dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, Texas, said medical societies, like the American Society of Nephrology (ASN), “are incredibly powerful.”

“I think the issue is going to be this—the antiscience world is not shrinking. It’s growing,” said Hotez, “I think part of it is growing because too often we’re silent.”

When he was receiving his medical education in the 1980s, the belief and the message for physicians at the time was “you don’t engage the public, you don’t talk to journalists.”

He noted that those beliefs “were put in place before something called the internet came along.” Those long-standing philosophies allowed a vacuum to form and allow for misinformation and lies to spread, said Hotez, who first drew the ire of antivaccination groups due to a book he wrote about his daughter, who has autism and intellectual disabilities, called Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad.

Combatting falsehoods is too big for any one organization on its own, said another panelist.

“It’s going to take the entire health care ecosystem working together,” said Reed Tuckson, MD, FACP, who owns his own firm and is a co-founder of the Black Coalition Against COVID.

Tuckson, who was previously executive vice president and chief of medical affairs for UnitedHealth Group, said that in the coming weeks, a new effort to create that ecosystem would be announced. The plan, to join a large swath of medical societies, pharmaceutical and biotechnology players, scientists, and hospital associations, aims to build public trust while combatting misinformation.

Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, said that when she has talked with individuals about these issues—whether they believe in conspiracy theories, or are celebrities—they say they don’t know who to trust. If she responds by asking if they can go to their health care provider as a source of trusted information, the most common answer is that they don't have one.

In his speech, Hotez noted that Americans died in large numbers of COVID-19 even after vaccines were introduced. One estimate, released last spring, said that as many as 319,000 Americans died between January 2021 and April 2022.

Earlier in the morning, Susan E. Quaggin, MD, FASN, current ASN president, touted the life-changing innovations in kidney care that are saving lives. But she also alluded to the new challenges that all physicians face in the current political environment.

“We must stand up to policies that criminalize best care or threaten the interactions between physicians, health care team members, and our patients, as we we’ve seen throughout many parts of the world, and now here at home, in the United States," she said.

Last week, the state medical board, which is appointed by the Republican governor, voted to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth under the age of 18. The state has also banned abortion after 15 weeks with no exceptions for rape, incest, or human trafficking; the ban is being challenged in court.