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CHICAGO -- Members of the American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates adopted a new policy aimed at addressing disinformation during the association's on Monday.

Kavita Arora, MD, a delegate for the AMA's Young Physicans Section, who had proposed the policy, said during a discussion online on Saturday that while the AMA had an existing policy focused on the dissemination of accurate medical information to the public, the association lacked a policy to address disinformation -- i.e., "information that is willfully inaccurate," she said.

The new resolutions called for the AMA to: first, take aim at disinformation in all types of media; and second, focus inward and tackle disinformation promoted by members of the medical community.

"[W]hen physicians ... and other medical professionals join in this disinformation, the effects can seriously undermine the public health efforts of the whole medical community," Arora said.

Richard Pan, MD, an alternate delegate from California, supported both resolutions while also suggesting an amendment to specifically address media manipulation and social media as drivers of disinformation.

Pan noted that even before COVID, vaccine misinformation was rampant.

For example, in California, the percentage of children who weren't receiving vaccines upon entering school had been "consistent for decades" at around 0.5%, he said. Then in the late 1990s, those numbers started to increase, around the time the discredited physician Andrew Wakefield, MBBS, published a false report in The Lancet linking vaccines to autism. And then the percentage of unvaccinated children spiked again in the mid-2000s, with the invention of Facebook and other social media.

"So, I think we really do need to look at the role of social media in amplifying those who want to push out disinformation," Pan said.

Humayun Chaudhry, DO, president and CEO of the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), expressed support for the resolution and highlighted the FSMB's own efforts to combat disinformation, including a statement released in July affirming that sharing disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and other efforts to reduce transmission "represent[s] a breach of professional responsibility and could result in disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of a medical license."

Sixteen other medical boards have endorsed the FSMB's statement or produced their own similar statements, he said.

And the FSMB is working to develop additional guidance to member boards that "clarify expectations of licensees regarding the appropriate use of evidence, physician responsibilities related to informed consent in treating relationships, and the importance of safeguarding society's trust in the medical profession," Chaudhry said.

Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH, speaking for the AMA Board of Trustees, also applauded the resolution, but suggested that simply asking for collaboration with stakeholders is "likely not sufficient."

He cited a from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, which called for a national strategy to address health-related misinformation and disinformation. (He defined misinformation as "false or inaccurate information shared largely unwittingly" and the disinformation as a subset of misinformation that is "created with deliberate intentions to deceive.")

Ehrenfeld said the AMA's board also sees a need for "a more comprehensive" response strategy, which could involve advocacy groups, health solution stakeholders, and the Center for Health Equity, among others.

He recommended that the board prepare its own comprehensive report, lay out an organizational strategy that could be implemented alongside other partners, and report back at the next House of Delegates meeting in June 2022.

The AMA committee on public health , agreeing with the recommendation to not only holistically address disinformation but also to study disinformation spread by health professionals, examine its impact on public health, and develop a strategy to mitigate the problem.

The policies on combating disinformation were combined and amended and on Monday.

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