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This is Lindsay Smith-Roggers. Today, what happened to doctors spreading misinformation during the COVID pandemic?

Lena Sun, an author of an investigative series at the Washington Post, speaks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein.

Let's listen.

Lina, son, it is so great to have you on public health on call.

I have been meaning to call you as soon as I saw your investigation in the Washington Post called

Doctors Who Put Lives at Risk with COVID Misinformation Rarely Punished.

Thank you, Josh.

Happy to be here.

And it's actually a subject that I was thinking about looking into for many, many months before we started.

So doctors who put lives at risk with COVID misinformation,

what are we talking about here? We are talking about doctors, especially at the height of the

pandemic, who were jumping into the vacuum where we didn't know that much about the virus and saying

all sorts of false and misleading things, not only about COVID, but about benefits of masks, benefits of vaccine, benefits of treatment.

And this was something that we looked into for months, my colleagues and I, Lauren Weber, and Hayden Godfrey.

And were you looking particularly at doctors who were taking care of patients and maybe advocating against vaccination or prescribing them useless or potentially dangerous medicines?

Or were you looking at doctors who were going on TV, going on the radio, and telling everyone not to get vaccinated or to use unproven treatments.

We were looking at the entire landscape. We wanted to know in a most broad way if any of these

doctors who were both spreading misinformation and prescribing not recommended treatments to patients

...