![]() ![]() ![]() With a total nonvaccination harm of $1 billion per day and misinformation and disinformation causing between 5% and 30% of this harm, misinformation and disinformation have caused between $50 and $300 million worth of total harm every day since May 2021, when the vaccines were freely available to most US adults-underscoring that the costs during the Delta variant surge were much higher. These estimates and sources are described in our worksheet. While most of this measured harm is the monetized value of mortality and morbidity, about $60 million of the $1 billion per day total is monetary or financial harm (costs to the healthcare system and economic losses from individuals missing work). Even after the surge in US cases caused by the Delta variant subsides, this level of harm (estimated at 300 deaths, 1,200 hospitalizations, and 20,000 cases per day or more) will continue for at least several months. Harms from nonvaccination and associated costs of misinformation were much higher during the Delta surge. 5 Our conservative estimate, which does not take into account lower transmission in the future, 6 reflects relatively low levels of disease transmission during June and July 2021. This estimate is based on the costs of hospitalizations and the valuation of lives lost and long-term morbidity due to COVID-19 calculated using the standard methodology for US Department of Health and Human Services regulatory impact analysis. We calculate that total voluntary COVID-19 nonvaccination has caused at least $1 billion of harm each day in the United States since vaccines became widely available. As of early October 2021, about 22% of the US adult population, 4 or 43 million people, have chosen nonvaccination, so we estimate that between 2 and 12 million people are unvaccinated because of misinformation or disinformation. 3 Even accounting for fear of novelty, it seems plausible that much of this difference is caused by misinformation and disinformation. About 23% of people not vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 say they normally get an annual flu shot. ![]() This is based on experimental studies on misinformation that showed a 6 percentage point decrease in vaccination intent, 2 and comparison of total numbers receiving influenza vaccines compared to those receiving COVID-19 vaccines. More research is needed to include these factors, but the estimate used in this analysis is that misinformation and disinformation cause between 5% and 30% of voluntary nonvaccination in the United States. 1 Many other factors-such as lack of access to care, preexisting distrust of the medical system, or instinctive hesitancy to take a novel treatment-can lead to nonvaccination, even in the absence of misinformation or disinformation. Studies establishing causality between voluntary nonvaccination and misinformation and disinformation are limited, and it is important to recognize that nonvaccination may not be necessarily caused by either, even though there is a significant correlation between believing misinformation and disinformation and not being vaccinated. To begin to fill this gap, we have developed an nitial conservative estimate of the total monetized costs of one facet of this issue-the misinformation- or disinformation-informed decision to not get a COVID-19 vaccine. The challenge to assigning an exact, high-confidence monetary cost to them is the lack of detailed data available on this issue. ![]() Misinformation and disinformation have contributed to reduced trust in medical professionals and public health responders, increased belief in false medical cures, politicized public health countermeasures aimed at curbing transmission of the disease, and increased loss of life.Īs a country, we do not yet have a trusted set of approaches for managing misinformation and disinformation or exact methods for monetizing the costs resulting from their spread. These messages include the inadvertent spread of erroneous information (misinformation) or deliberately created and propagated false or misleading information (disinformation). The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that false or misleading health-related information can dangerously undermine the response to a public health crisis. ![]()
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