ST JAMES, Jamaica— Minister of Health and Wellness, Dr Christopher Tufton, says that contending with misinformation while focusing on the problems associated with the coronavirus pandemic has been posing a significant challenge to health authorities.

In fact, Dr Tufton, who was speaking virtually at the Ministry’s Health Promotion and Education Review on November 4, said the problem continues to intensify daily, especially with the advent and influence of social media.

“Communication in today’s modern world has to contend and compete with what I classify as [noise]… some may call it distractions,” the minister argued.

“We no longer live in a world where you get your information from traditional sources. In fact, it is non-traditional sources that normally set the trend in how information is passed on. My colleague Minister of Health in Trinidad [couldn’t have put it better] when he said that our doctors and nurses have trained and worked hard for their degrees, yet there are more persons in the world today who have PhDs in Twitter, Instagram and social media,” he said.

Dr Tufton said that frighteningly, the world is at a stage where “everybody” wants, and quotes information based on what “they pulled down from off the Internet,” adding that “nobody questions the source or the context… nobody interrogates… or we don’t do it enough… or too many of us don’t do it”.

“Now it becomes a case that because we have gotten the information from off the Internet, then it must be gospel,” Dr Tufton said, adding that “when you have to compete with that… I want you to understand how challenging that must be for those who work in public health and are trying to deal with the dreaded pandemic at the same time”.

The minister said that from very early in the game [since the onset of COVID-19], Ministry officials realised that effective communication would be critical in dealing with a public that was yearning for information about a new but dangerous pandemic and at the same time confronting what predictably would be an onslaught of misinformation.

He added that public health officials must pivot to confront the rampant misinformation that is trending on the social airwaves, noting that the Government has been struggling against a robust online anti-vax campaign as it moves to improve the country’s vaccination rate.

Dr Tufton said that while it is tempting to ignore the “noise”, he has come to the realisation that such a position could also be counterproductive, creating a situation where falsehoods and conspiracy theories become the controlling narrative.

“We have to ensure that our presentation is equally as good as our message. I am not afraid to say that information being produced from official channels is sometimes amateurish, while those from the anti-vax campaigns are often more appealing than the information being disseminated by the official channels. We must pay more attention to the optics of the message as well as the content,” he emphasised.