This Public Health Funder Fears COVID Falsehoods May Topple the Last Pillar of Democracy

arindambanerjee/shutterstock

As a public health funder for more than two decades, the de Beaumont Foundation has always held a particular interest in helping doctors and public health professionals more effectively communicate with their patients and communities. Now, with the COVID pandemic serving as a proxy battleground between the right and the left, the foundation wants to ensure that facts—and democracy—survive.

Long before COVID entered the picture, de Beaumont spearheaded the development of research-based communication tools to help health professionals. When COVID emerged, the pandemic naturally became a focus for de Beaumont. In late 2020 and early 2021, the foundation and its President and CEO Brian Castrucci decided to confront issues like COVID misinformation, vaccine myths, and the role of social media, particularly as they exacerbated the nation’s political divisions.

More particularly, the de Beaumont Foundation sought to address vaccine hesitancy among Republicans. For its Changing the COVID Conversation initiative, de Beaumont conducted focus groups with well-known Republican pollster Frank Luntz to develop effective messaging that targets concerns and questions common among Republicans.

This work, says de Beaumont, has had a major impact on COVID communications around the country. The foundation has worked with the White House, the CDC and other philanthropic foundations, among others. Its messaging has influenced outreach throughout the country.

“Our materials helped Democrats and political leaders address the concerns in their constituencies,” Castrucci said. Several well-known Republican political figures, including former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, also worked with de Beaumont.

The foundation is also developing new initiatives, such as the Public Health Communications Collaborative, founded with the CDC Foundation and Trust for America’s Health, as well as the Health Action Alliance, focused on businesses and public health, which was co-founded with RWJF, the CDC Foundation, the Business Roundtable and the Ad Council. 

Philanthropy has, of course, worked with public health officials before to address the national and global epidemic of misinformation—what the World Health Organization calls an “infodemic” that’s undermining efforts to fight COVID and keep people healthy. For example, we recently wrote about the Mercury Project, launched by the Social Science Research Council, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation ($7.5 million,) Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($2 million) and Craig Newmark Philanthropies ($500,000.) The Mercury Project will fund research to quantify the scope and impact of COVID misinformation, and to find methods to address it.

Despite these and other steps, Castrucci and de Beaumont recognized that the country was in a losing battle with COVID misinformation—unscientific, unsupported ideas coming not just from anyone with access to a Twitter account, but from what are supposed to be trusted sources—namely, doctors.

“What I think we learned through all of this was how destructive misinformation was—that it really was a failing of public health not to clip those weeds of misinformation early,” Castrucci said.

Confronting “disinformation doctors”

In a report co-issued last month with the public health advocacy group No License for Disinformation—a coalition of doctors, nurses, parents and disability advocates—the de Beaumont Foundation called for potential professional consequences for physicians who were found to have spread COVID disinformation. The report, “Disinformation Doctors: Licensed to Mislead,” says that a “small but vocal minority of physicians are intentionally and publicly spreading disinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines. In doing so, they are putting lives at risk and violating their professional oath.”

The report criticizes state medical boards—the bodies that license physicians to practice legally in their given state—for allowing these so-called “disinformation doctors” to continue to practice and renew their medical licenses without considering how they might have spread COVID-related misinformation.

“We’re not saying, ‘take this person’s license.’ We’re saying to medical boards to do your investigation,” Castrucci said. However, according to the report, state boards have continued to rubber-stamp license renewal applications despite a July 2021 statement from the Federation of State Medical Boards—the national organization representing all U.S. state medical boards—asserting that dissemination of COVID-related disinformation by doctors will not be tolerated. “Just as doctors have a duty to act in their patients’ best interest, state medical boards have a duty to act in the public’s best interest,” the report reads.

More recently, in an essay co-authored with Nick Sawyer, executive director of the No License for Disinformation coalition, published online by NBC, Castrucci reiterated the call for state board scrutiny of doctors who spread misinformation and myths about COVID, vaccines and medicines.

At a minimum, medical boards must consider the spread of scientifically dubious or nonsensical information by doctors. “When you weaponize that white coat against the American people, the medical boards have to act,” Castrucci said. COVID-19 isn’t America’s first pandemic, but it’s the first one during which social media has enabled anyone to communicate with millions of other people—and to spread not just opinions, but outright nonsense, he said.

When I spoke with Castrucci about the messages in the report and essay, he was pretty adamant about linking the rampant myth-making around COVID and vaccines to far larger concerns about the constitutional and legal glue that holds the country together. “Culturally, there have been many efforts to ensure that the [physician’s] white coat is an icon of science, and it’s legitimized even further by the medical boards,” he said. “When you have the pillars of science start to share disinformation, they are literally eroding our democracy because they are eroding belief in fact and science and truth.”

The same sort of attack on truth, Castrucci said, was behind the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “There are only so many pillars that hold up democracy. One of them is belief and trust in the media, and that’s eroding. And one of them is belief in and trust in government, and that’s eroding,” he said. “If we don’t believe in science, if we don’t believe in medicine, then it’s the last pillar to fall.”