If someone told you that that misinformation killed 2,800 Canadians based on a single opinion poll by Abacus Data, would you believe them? I would have a hard time buying it.
Last week, a report by the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) made the brash claim that misinformation killed 2,800 Canadians during nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The model behind this figure assumed that belief in misinformation caused most cases of non-vaccination. It was too simplistic to be useful, but that didn’t really matter — the feds produced yet another expert-backed report that connected the word “misinformation” with death and fear that would stoke hysteria in the press.
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The CCA itself is a federally registered non-profit, but works like a government entity. It’s governed by a board of directors, one-third of which is appointed by the Minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development. Its research agenda is largely driven by the federal government — the feds give the CCA’s board a list of research proposals, from which the board chooses five to pursue. The board also picks which experts to convene for each project.
The science department serves as the CCA’s financial backbone, giving grants that average $3 million per year (these grants form the bulk of the organization’s annual revenue). These federal grants come with substantial annual reporting to the responsible minister — financial plans, work schedules, and even policies for diversity, equity, and inclusion all must be disclosed. The CCA might not be a crown corporation, but it walks and talks like one.
The independent report used a methodology that would pin actual deaths on “misinformation” — the regulation of which is a key goal of the current government. The authors drew their model’s assumptions on Canadian misinformation beliefs from an Abacus Data poll conducted in August 2021. The poll examined the beliefs of people who were vaccine hesitant as well outright refusers. Participants selected any number of reasons from a list of 17 to explain their stances on vaccines.
Only two of the 17 reasons in the poll were categorized as misinformed beliefs by the CAA: that vaccines caused many problems that were covered up and that COVID was either a hoax or exaggerated. (Even this is a bit too broad to be useful: grand theories of hoaxes and coverups are far-fetched, but some might reasonably argue that the severity of the pandemic was exaggerated.) Of the vaccine-hesitant, 34 per cent believed that COVID was a “hoax/exaggerated” and 66 per cent believed that vaccines caused covered-up problems. Of the refusers, 73 per cent believed former, while 85 per cent believed the latter.
Assuming that misinformation caused vaccine hesitancy, the report authors modelled what COVID vaccination rates would look like if no one believed in either types of misinformation. The “no misinformation” models contained a smaller number of unvaccinated individuals, so fewer people were at risk of dying of COVID. The authors concluded that misinformation kills.
It’s not fair to assume that eliminating all misinformed beliefs would have caused that much more vaccination, though. Abacus’ data showed that the biggest reason given for remaining unvaccinated was hating being told by the government what to do. Others included those “reluctant to take any vaccines,” lack of trust in government, preference to avoid prescriptions, unease with the COVID vaccine’s speedy development and hatred of needles. Finally, apathy — less prominent during covid, but a large factor in Canada’s historical flu vaccine coverage of 30 per cent.
Applying the CAA report’s reasoning to other snippets of Abacus’ data, I could argue that having an untrustworthy government caused 2,800 deaths. With the right assumptions, any model is possible.
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The rest of the report’s 260 pages were spent on (very broadly) characterizing misinformation. Citing a multitude of studies on topics under the misinformation umbrella, the authors described types of misinformation, sources, targets, effects and so on. The report even applied the term “misinformation” to politics. To describe Ontario’s old cap-and-trade carbon pricing system as a “job killing carbon tax” was misinformation, the report said. Even disagreements on economic policy weren’t safe from the word — the net was cast too wide by the authors.
Despite the focus on misinformation, the CAA’s report cited dodgy academic work itself. It claimed that unvaccinated individuals can increase the risk of infection among those who are vaccinated, citing a faulty modeling study that was criticized by public health scholars for not taking into account that unvaccinated individuals can still have post-infection immunity.
The CAA’s report is useful in rhetoric, shaping the misinformation accusation into a life-or-death matter that is useful against opponents. It’s notable that the study was chaired by sociologist and former Clerk of the Privy Council Alex Himelfarb, whose academic and governance background extends into the left-wing think tank world. Himelfarb is also a fellow of the Broadbent Institute and chair of the federally-funded Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ national office board — both left-wing organizations that wield accusations of misinformation to discredit opposing political views.
The CCA believes it has a low risk of being perceived as lacking independence and objectivity, according to its 2022-23 corporate plan. Perhaps this risk should be revised up — using back-of-the-napkin math and opinion polling to prove that misinformation carries a quantifiable death toll really serves the legislative goals of those who fund the whole thing.
National Post
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