The Role Regulatory Agencies Should Play in the Battle Against Misinformation

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Jen Butler, Chief Commercial Officer for Pleio, discussed the significant threat of misinformation to public health, citing a 2021 report by former Surgeon General Murthy. She highlighted that 70% of false news is shared more often than true news due to its emotional appeal. Butler emphasized the importance of verifying health information by directly contacting trusted sources like Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and Kaiser Permanente. She also noted the role of pharma in supporting patient communities and the need for media and health literacy. Butler also suggested that peer-to-patient platforms can enhance patient engagement and adherence, particularly for chronic conditions.

What role should regulatory agencies be playing in the battle against misinformation?

That’s such a loaded question, right? I am not going to be one to preach with the regulatory agencies. They're going to do what they need to do. But I do believe that having all this information available is a blessing. I mean really, we can't censor information, nor should we curtail the modern technology development to make it accessible. So, I think we have to kind of put that aside and to the points that we were talking about earlier. It's how do we better focus on education with media literacy, health literacy. What does it look like? What information are you collecting? Is in fact, or is it opinion? And then, where do you go? To drill further. How do you know the information you're coming that you're getting is a verified, validated source, depending on what channel you're seeking it from, and how do you just quickly fact check with the with the direct sources that are out there.

I think that there can be amazing opportunities to diagnose and make people aware of symptoms a lot earlier than we ever were aware of. I mean going on TikTok, just looking at all the different ways of cancer symptoms and patients talking and wanting to get awareness out of what they went through when they found out that they are diagnosed with whatever cancer it is. I mean getting that public information out is a huge service to public health but just taking that one person's advice is not going to be a service to you, as a patient. And so, you don't want to curb or mitigate any of that information flow, but just more focused on, how do we put that education into place? And even back in 2021 Murthy was saying, we need to focus this on training and education across all key stakeholders to make sure that we have ways to validate our information.