Surgeon General's Health Misinformation Toolkit Misinforms the Public

Perhaps the Surgeon General should not be our Minister of Truth

The Surgeon General published a Community Toolkit for Addressing Health Misinformation some time last year. It’s still available on the HHS website. It’s stunning that the toolkit itself fails at its key task—defining misinformation—and fails so badly that it—itself—qualifies as that which it condemns. Of course, this failure is inevitable, as the task it presents as simple is in fact impossible, or at least highly non-trivial with no obvious solutions.

First, some sample screenshots:

The key question any guide to identifying misinformation must answer is how to arrive at truth, so that one can know what misinformation even is. This document points to the CDC website as the authoritative source:

Does the CDC website serve this purpose? Well, its COVID-19 “Myths and Facts” page tells us that the idea that post-infection (a.k.a. Natural) immunity being "better" than vaccine-generated immunity is a… "MYTH.”

Is that true? Not according to "the latest research.” By the CDC, that is. Yes, that's not a typo, this claim is demonstrably false, as shown by the latest CDC research. Reading the paper, this reality has been a consistent pattern throughout the period they investigated. Not only is it not a "MYTH,” it's a reasonable position that should be investigated, and in fact appears to be true.

Here’s a particularly telling figure from the CDC paper:

Among scientists, it's not really in dispute, having been backed by over 150 studies to date. The ONLY vocally dissenting body was… the CDC. After two years of the pandemic, they've finally given up and confessed to what their data has been showing all along.

This is not a minor issue, either. It's arguably the most important question of the pandemic—from which policies on lockdowns, vaccination, masking, mandates, and most other policies—depend. And the CDC has it catastrophically, avoidably wrong—contradicting their own research.

So if the authority that the Surgeon General's misinformation toolkit points to gets such a fundamental claim about the pandemic so disastrously wrong, it can't be a reliable reference. This is the most important thing for such a guide to get right. This means that the toolkit itself misinforms the people it claims to help... at the task of spotting misinformation. And you only need CDC sources to demonstrate this, which, according to the guide, are in fact reliable.

The uncomfortable truth is that the CDC has been a source of comically bad science throughout. Papers were constructed in violation of the scientific method, likely to provide backing for a politically expedient position. Many such cases demonstrated by [@VPrasadMDMPH](https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH) in his article for Tablet Magazine.

If misinformation coming from YouTube channels is dangerous, isn't misinformation coming from Official Sources far more dangerous? It's one thing for an elder relative to be misled—quite another for the whole medical establishment and the policy framework itself to be misled.

So, if the Surgeon General really is focused on reducing the prevalence of misinformation, I suggest he knock on Rochelle Wallensky's door with some tough questions—and then take a long hard look at the mirror—before he goes asking around and giving deadlines to tech companies.

The concept of equality before the law goes at least as far back as the Magna Carta. A government cannot be pursuing individuals based on a standard of which it is the most prominent and consequential violator. While not a medical professional, I suspect a prescription of extra strength intellectual humility might be in order. It's off-patent though, so I don't expect they'll take my advice.