Report on health misinformation – 3 questions to Mathieu Molimard
RetourEngaged in the fight against misinformation, Mathieu Molimard, pharmacologist at the University Hospital and researcher with the AHEAD team, joined by his co-autors, submitted their report to the Minister of Health
entitled “Assessment of strengths and weaknesses – Recommendations for a national strategy for information and combating misinformation in health.”
On this occasion, we asked three questions to Mathieu Molimard
On January 12, 2026, Mathieu Molimard, head of the pharmacology department at Pellegrin University Hospital and researcher with the AHEAD-BPH team, submitted a report on health misinformation to the Minister of Health, Families, Independence, and People with Disabilities.
Co-authored with Dominique Costagliola, emeritus research director at INSERM, and Hervé Maisonneuve, public health physician specializing in ethics and scientific publishing, this report is an initiative of Mathieu himself, who, for several years now, specifically in the wake of COVID, has been committed to combating health misinformation.
This is an issue that has been evolving in recent years and which, in his view, threatens our democracy.
What was the moment and what observations led you to recognize the need to get into the fight against misinformation in healthcare?
I was in charge of communications for the Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, which is a scientific society, and at the same time I was conducting research on the use, benefits, and risks of drugs in the population.
The Covid crisis was a real turning point. We were faced with something we hadn’t expected.
Within the department, we were responsible for monitoring and pharmacovigilance of vaccines.
It was in this context that we noticed that misinformation was very widespread and was leading people to give up or refuse treatment based on the predictions of misinformers.
I felt that science needed to be brought back to the forefront in order to prevent people from turning away from protective measures or, conversely, adopting illusory treatments.
But to tackle misinformation, we need to understand what it is based on.
Health is a special case because it affects our lives, making us more sensitive to our emotions and fears. We become more vulnerable to misinformation, whose methods of manipulation rely on these mechanisms, particularly during an epidemic or when faced with an untreatable disease.
Vaccines are the most prominent topic of health misinformation because they are distributed on a massive scale and are given to people who are in good health. You are injecting someone with something that may cause side effects when they had nothing wrong with them. So if the vaccine is not properly explained, people may ask themselves, “Am I really saving myself?”
This context, combined with a population that is poorly educated in science, health, and critical thinking, creates a tremendous opportunity for those who want to take advantage of the crisis to make money and manipulate people.
While health misinformation became widespread during the COVID crisis, it continues with serious diseases by proposing unvalidated therapeutic solutions.
How was this report prepared, and why did you choose these two co-authors?
The government already had a communication plan in place with the health misinformation observatory.
The Minister Delegate for Health and Access to Healthcare gave us the task of doing some extensive research to supplement the ministry’s recommendations.
As we didn’t have a lot of resources to produce this report, we had to put together an additional team.
Dominique Costagliola had experience with the report, a good knowledge of the scientific community, and unquestionable rigor. It was important to have someone of her stature.
Hervé Maisonneuve, for his writing skills and his good knowledge of how newspapers work, as former president of the Society of Scientific Press Publishers.
To collect the information needed to write the report, we had to make a significant but exciting investment:
270 people with a potential role in health information were interviewed,
156 interviews were conducted over three months, sometimes six in a single day,
and more than 800 pages of reports were produced.
The main conclusion we drew from this was that people are fed up with misinformation and therefore have a real desire to be heard.
Secondly, we are vulnerable because our society is not prepared to deal with this misinformation. People do not have the necessary education in science, health, or critical thinking to avoid becoming victims or relays of misinformation.
The scientific method is not widely understood; most people do not know how to do science.
This is how we come to face the problem of hydroxychloroquine, for example.
The scientific method consists of putting forward a hypothesis, testing it to see how far it holds up, and rejecting it if it doesn’t. With hydroxychloroquine, they did the opposite: they started with the assumption that “it works,” kept everything that supported this assumption, and rejected anything that invalidated it.
We need to react and learn from this crisis, otherwise, when the next epidemic hits, it will once again be the disinformers who will take advantage at the detriment of public health.
What measures does the report suggest to combat disinformation?
The report sets out nine recommendations covering two areas.
The first is promoting information through:
- Lifelong learning. Science, health, and critical thinking should be teaching from kindergarten to nursing homes, but also at the ENA, because our politicians aren’t trained in health issues.
- Training scientists in communication: “It’s good to produce knowledge, but you have to let people know about it.” Scientists must learn to talk about their field of expertise in the media.
But we also need to train more science journalists, as there are too few of them in newsrooms, which leads to the widespread dissemination of buzz without scientific rationality.
To encourage widespread mobilization, we propose a public health information plan for each institution. - The Health Infoscore, a tool for measuring the quality of editorial production. This score would validate an information production method (information verified by a scientific committee, reliable sources, management of links and interests, etc.).
- A health information observatory that coordinates all platforms and actors in the field, bringing together information from reliable sources on a portal or generative AI that can be interrogated, for example.
- A directory of experts to contact to discuss a topic, which will avoid asking scientists to talk about a topic for which they have no academic credentials.
- The second aspect directly concerns the fight against disinformation:
Disinformation must be identified and shared in a data warehouse with a reporting system, so that the seriousness of each case can be analyzed and, if necessary, a response can be communicated to the public or legal proceedings and sanctions can be initiated. - Protecting researchers and reversing the risk. Harassment, threats, etc. Currently, the risk lies with scientists who speak out in the public domain, while disinformers use their financial resources (several hundred thousand euros) to contribute to this harassment and launch gag orders that cost scientists a great deal of money.
To do this, there is no need to necessarily apply new laws; let’s start by applying existing laws. - Conduct research on misinformation (“infodemiology”) to understand the drivers of its virality and its cost in terms of its impact on society.
For example, Antoine Pariente, from the AHEAD-BPH team, worked on the cost generated by disinformation about hydroxychloroquine, which amounted to €1 million for the purchase of the drug alone, not counting the deaths associated with this treatment. - Develop research at the European level, because misinformation knows no borders, and the fight will not be fought at the national level alone. Digital platforms are not simply data warehouses: they have a real editorial policy that algorithmically propels the data that generates more reactions.
With such a system, they risk promoting the dissemination of engaging but false or scientifically unvalidated information. They must therefore strengthen their moderation.
In closing, I would say that we must increase the visibility of quality information to make misinformation invisible.