What Were the Information Voids? A Qualitative Analysis of Questions Asked by Dear Pandemic Readers between August 2020-August 2021

In the current infodemic, how individuals receive information (channel), who it is coming from (source), and how it is framed can have an important effect on COVID-19 related mitigation behaviors. In light of these challenges presented by the infodemic, Dear Pandemic (DP) was created to directly address persistent questions related to COVID-19 and other health topics in the online environment. This is a qualitative analysis of 3806 questions that were submitted by DP readers to a question box on the Dear Pandemic website between August 30, 2020 and August 29, 2021. Analyses resulted in four themes: the need for clarification of other sources; lack of trust in information; recognition of possible misinformation; and questions on personal decision-making. Each theme reflects an unmet informational need of Dear Pandemic readers, which may be reflective of the broader informational gaps in our science communication efforts. This study highlights the role of an ad hoc risk communication platform in the current environment and uses questions submitted to the Dear Pandemic question box to identify informational needs of DP readers over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings may help clarify how organizations addressing health misinformation in the digital space can contribute to timely, responsive science communication and improve future communication efforts

The Target Efficiency of Online Medicaid/CHIP Enrollment: An Evaluation of Wisconsin’s ACCESS Internet Portal

States are building automated online processes to facilitate enrollment in Medicaid and the new health insurance exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Wisconsin’s build-out of ACCESS, its online application system for health coverage and other public benefits, happened concurrentl

Fight Like a Nerdy Girl: The Dear Pandemic Playbook for Combating Health Misinformation

Raging alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, a parallel “infodemic” – an overwhelming swirl of information, both good and bad – has seriously compromised pandemic response. Medical falsehood is not a new problem; in the words of medical sociologist Nikolas Christakis, “everywhere you see the spread of germs, for the last few thousand years, you see right behind it the spread of lies.” But its ability to scale thanks to modern digital platforms represents a new and greatly intensified threat. Indeed, the impact of harmful information during the pandemic has been so profound that premier scientific leaders including the Director-General of the World Health Organization and the U.S. Surgeon General have issued urgent calls for the health sector workforce to proactively fight back. Like many other scientists, our all-woman team of “Nerdy Girls” took seriously this call. In March 2020 we launched a public education campaign on social media to do our part to fight the infodemic. Over 18 months and more than two thousand Facebook posts later, we have refined a set of core communication principles and named them with the mnemonic LET’S LEARN. We anticipate that these principles will feel intuitively familiar to health promotion professionals. Formalizing them into a framework provides shared language with which we can support each other as we navigate the new professional frontier of infodemic management