MythInformed Science

In June 2024, a major water main ruptured in Calgary, and some residents refused to believe it was happening. Jennifer Irish, a principal at Pendulum Geopolitical Advisory, founding director of the University of Ottawa's Information Integrity Lab, and a former Canadian diplomat and national security executive, points to it as a sign of something larger. When people can no longer tell what is...

When someone rejects the evidence, the instinct is to hit back with better facts. Dr. Kumanan Wilson, a general internal medicine specialist who has spent two decades studying vaccine hesitancy, says that move can backfire. He recalls trying to change naturopathic students' minds with hard data and a polio survivor's story, and watching the room turn more anti-vaccine. When a belief is t...

AI in healthcare is often talked about as something magical. Dr. Douglas Manuel, a family and public health physician, senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and organizer of Ottawa's recent symposium on AI in health research, pushes back on that. AI is a tool, he argues, an instrument like the thermometer or the blood pressure cuff. A revolution, yes, but medicine has be...

Misinformation actors have a favourite move: point to scientists who changed their recommendations and say, see, you can't trust the experts. Jeremy Grimshaw, one of the world's leading authorities on evidence synthesis, has a systematic answer to that. He also reflects on a charged public forum in Alberta where he faced a room of organized COVID skeptics, and explains the approach that...

Silence is one misinformation strategy — it's just the wrong one. And when organizations do speak up, they often make the same mistake: assuming that better information changes minds. Dr. Ami Palmer, clinical ethicist and health misinformation researcher at MD Anderson Cancer Centre, has a more useful framework, and it starts with showing up in the information environments where your audience...

Ottawa's Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Trevor Arnason, joins Jamie and Justin to reflect on what five years of COVID has taught public health units about misinformation. He shares how Ottawa Public Health responded in real time to a false claim about a child's death at CHEO, why the legacy of COVID has made vaccine hesitancy harder to address, and why his team now treats misinformation...