School of Social Sciences and Education

GED104 Cluster – Science, Technology and Society

FC1 - Fact Checking 1
(Fake News and Disinformation in the time of COVID-19)

Name: Caro, Engelo John Gabriel V. Date: July 27, 2022

Section: A3 Course: GED104

Covid-19 has been running its course for a little under two years now and it shows no signs of
stopping. The efforts to stop the disease culminated in the creation of many variations of vaccines,
however the final nail in the coffin has yet to be found, the cure for Covid-19. In lieu of this, many a
sham took the opportunity to prey on the uninformed by selling them “cures” for Covid-19, yet as the
professionals discovered, all of such claims are ineffective at best and dangerous at most.

The tweet shown above is an example of such a fraudulent “cure”. The tweet implies that this
herbal product is a cure for Covid-19. The attached picture bears the label of “Cell Food”. Both of
these points serve two purposes, to inspire urgency and fear of missing out and to mask the lie by
throwing terms that sounded legitimate to the minds of the general public as shown by the label on the
bottle.

The claim that herbal remedies can cure Covid-19 is a commonly used scam to sell products
to people who don’t know better. A study conducted by Bazzo, Y. et al. has concluded that herbal
medicines will not cure or prevent Covid-19, but it can help alleviate its adverse effects. Simply put,
the nature of Covid-19 makes it fairly difficult to formulate a cure for it. Covid-19 has been described
to have a unique infectious profile that modern medicine has scarcely studied before. It is then not a
surprise that in an official statement by the World Health Organization, it was stated that “there are no
medicines that been shown to prevent or cure Covid-19”.

In the short-term, this type of disinformation has the potential to scam many people out of
their money, which they sorely need in this trying times. The real damage however is in the long-term.
In the event that a person would mistakenly believe that they are cured of the disease because of false
remedies, they can become a vector by which this misinformation can spread, and it won’t be just the
misinformation that they will spread. False belief that a person is cured of the virus has the dangerous
potential to spread even more, and potentially infect someone who is of high-risk. That is the true
danger of this type of misinformation.
 Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. We now live in a society where information is quite
literally at the layman’s fingertips. The countless studies born from hours of blood and sweat of
scientists, doctors, medical professionals, and other academics are just waiting to be read and this is
sufficient enough a weapon to deter misinformation. There is also a responsibility to spread verified
and true information to fight the spread of misinformation. To stay vigilant and keep an eye on sources
of fake news is how the war against misinformation can be won.

References:
Trinity College Dublin. (2021, May 7). Why is COVID-19 so hard to treat? Growing evidence points to
unique infectious profile. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 27, 2022 from
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210507121720.htm

Silveira, D., Prieto-Garcia, J. M., Boylan, F., Estrada, O., Fonseca-Bazzo, Y. M., Jamal, C. M., …
Heinrich, M. (2020). COVID-19: Is There Evidence for the Use of Herbal Medicines as
Adjuvant Symptomatic Therapy? Frontiers in Pharmacology, 11.
doi:10.3389/fphar.2020.581840

Aryan, B., 2022. 'Could It Work as a Cure? Maybe.' A Herbal Remedy for Coronavirus Is a Hit in
Africa, But Experts Have Their Doubts. [online] Time.com. Available at:
<https://time.com/5840148/coronavirus-cure-covid- organic-madagascar/> [Accessed 28
July 2022].

Cohut, M., 2022. 5 false claims about coronavirus remedies and why they are wrong. [online]
Medicalnewstoday.com. Available at: <https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/5-
persistent-myths-about-coronavirus-and-why- they-are-untrue#Myth-5:-Herbal-
remedies-can-help> [Accessed 28 July 2022].