The Surgeon General’s Community Toolkit for Addressing Health Misinformation provides specific guidance and resources for health care providers, educators, and community members to understand, identify, and stop the spread of health misinformation in their communities.
Preventing and addressing health misinformation is a major priority for the Surgeon General. Developed in collaboration with the Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES), the Surgeon General has released a community toolkit to address health misinformation in your communities, in addition to infographics on how to talk to your community about health misinformation and a health misinformation check-list.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been exposed to an abundance of information from a large number of sources. Amid all this information, many people have also been exposed to health misinformation: information that is false, inaccurate, or misleading according to the best available evidence at the time. Misinformation has caused confusion and led people to decline COVID-19 vaccines, reject public health measures such as masking and physical distancing, and use unproven treatments.
Although health misinformation is not a recent phenomenon, in recent years it has spread at unprecedented speed and scale, especially online. But, together, we have the power to build a healthier information environment where we make more informed decisions about our health and the health of our loved ones and communities.
Image Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
