Health Affairs December 15, 2025
The state of our information ecosystem poses an unequivocal public health threat. Nearly 1.1 million Americans died directly from COVID-19, and this toll was exacerbated by the proliferation of mis/disinformation that exposed and deepened pervasive national health vulnerabilities: the deliberate politicization of scientific guidance, distrust in public institutions, deep-rooted vaccine hesitancy, and anti-science sentiment. No other preventable driver – from supply chain disruptions to mask policy delays – appears to have had as profound an impact as mis/disinformation, which undermined compliance, contributed to thousands of preventable deaths, and helped transform the global health emergency into a mass casualty event.
Today, one of the most aggressive modern drivers of mis/disinformation is generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) — systems that can autonomously produce...
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