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Hi listeners. It's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, a new report on misinformation and disinformation from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Professor Vish Vishwanaath is the Lee Komkei Professor of Health Communication at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

He also served as chair of a blue ribbon panel examining misinformation about science.

He speaks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the challenges of misinformation and distrust and what can be done to counter them.

Let's listen.

Professor Bish Thiswanah, thank you so much for joining me today on Public Health on Call to talk about misinformation,

which is the subject of a major report that you participated in at the National Academies.

How are you doing today?

Good morning. Thank you. I'm doing well. Thank you for having me, Josh.

So let's start with a question that seems so simple, but when you start digging into it, maybe not so

simple. What is misinformation? Sure. So there's a lot of synonyms that are being used for misinformation,

false information, wrong information, inaccurate information. The way the committee defined

misinformation about science is that any claim that is contrary or

different from that asserts something different from the current scientific evidence.

So it's important to note that point current scientific evidence. So these are

claims that are departing from the current scientific evidence. And that implies that if the

evidence changes, something that might have been misinformation might no longer be misinformation.

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