NEW YORK - Remember when at the inception of the pandemic a pamphlet, incorrectly attributed to Stanford Hospital, California, claimed falsehoods, such as drinking lots of water, help protect against COVID-19 infection? Within days, the post swept through social media like wildfire and was shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook¹ ‘Wildfires’ like this add up. Currently, misinformation around COVID-19 vaccines causes US$50 to US$300 million worth of harm every day in the United States alone, according to the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. This amount is consumed primarily in hospitalizations, which would be completely avoidable with an up-to-date vaccination.²

Misinformation and science skepticism have been with humanity since well before the discovery of vaccines, and posed a recurring challenge for health communication, i.e., the effective communication of health information toward lay audiences.³ The scale of health-related misinformation we are currently witnessing is unprecedented, and the speed of false information spreading through social media platforms exceeds that of accurate information.⁴

Traditional surveillance of disease outbreaks and risk monitoring fall within the purview of public health. Monitoring and controlling the spread of online misinformation, however, calls for cutting-edge means. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play. While AI adoption has become a priority for public health organizations, such as the World Health Organization subunit the Pan American Health Organization,⁵ the health sector at large currently sits at the bottom of the list when it comes to AI implementation, according to a recent report by London-based management consultancy McKinsey & Company.⁶

What public health needs to do, and quickly, to fight misinformation in the 21st c