Combating Vaccine Misinformation
Date: 2026-04-20
Category: Vaccines
Video overview
WebMD Chief Medical Officer Dr. John Whyte talks with Steven Brill, an award-winning journalist and co-CEO of NewsGuard, about vaccine misinformation and how to find information you can trust. NewsGuard, which Brill co-founded in 2018, rates the reliability of news and information websites.
What the conversation covers
- How false and misleading vaccine claims spread online
- Why misinformation sites can look as credible as real news sources
- Practical ways to check whether a source is trustworthy
- What platforms, publishers and readers can do to slow the spread
Why it matters
Misinformation spreads quickly because it is often emotional, simple and shared by people we trust. Checking a source before sharing it works well: look at who runs a site, whether it corrects its mistakes, and whether other reliable sources report the same thing. Brill has written about this problem at length, including in his book The Death of Truth.
Related reading: Science Fact-Checking, Social Media Amplification and COVID-19 Misinformation and Mandate Resistance.
Play time: 18:04
Video creator: WebMD
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Related Topics
References
| • | Explaining How Vaccines Work |
| • | How do vaccines work? |
| • | Vaccines and immunization: What is vaccination? |
| • | Understanding COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines |
| • | mRNA vaccines - a new era in vaccinology |