Fake news and corona hoaxes that are harmful to health

Honorato de Balzac said about his novel "Las Ilusiones Perdidas" that history is full of hoaxes that become birds of prey capable of eating up the essence of truth. For the father of the modern novel, the everyday life that he worked so hard to capture in his realistic accounts of his human comedy, people's daily lives revolve around a web of lies whose power is potentially an intense war machine.

It was precisely a lie that gave Adolf Hitler the exact alibi to begin his invasion of Poland and ignite the spark of World War II: the Gliwice incident in Poland on August 31, 1939, was an operation orchestrated from within Nazi power to blame the Poles for an attack they did not perpetrate, but which gave the Fuhrer the pretext to invade them.

Historian Florian Altenhöner recalls the deception in his book "The Man Who Started World War II", in which he also emphasises that Nazism used recurrent hoaxes as instruments of propaganda against the enemy and also woven a web of falsehoods that flowed like water to hinder the Allies' defensive tactics; the spies had to be very clever not to fall into the murky waters of confusion.

Recently, when the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, then-President George W. Bush repeatedly and bluntly asserted to the public and the media that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had laboratories with potential chemical weapons to be used against the Americans. The White House, in an intense propaganda, turned Hussein into the biggest threat to humanity because of his "chemical weapons of mass destruction"; however, to date, the US army has not been able to prove to the UN such chemical weapons and clandestine laboratories in Iraq.

A lie can overthrow an empire, Alexander the Great would say, on the way to Persia; with the coronavirus pandemic there is also an uproar of stirred up by some who intentionally seek to create black clouds of doubt and uncertainty in order to further shadow the current panorama. In addition to the global health emergency, the consequent economic schism due to the productive hibernation in some countries, a war of considerable intensity is taking place, provided with hoaxes to mislead and disconcert a population that is absorbed by uncertainty and fear of contagion.

In short, lies like hand grenades explode on social networks, finding a new battlefield for disinformation on the Internet at a time when people, in need of certainty as to what the virus is in itself, believe in everything that comes their way on the network and on many occasions it comes directly to them at the click of a button.

Since the WHO issued a warning to disregard all content on the networks that talk about home remedies or the combination of drugs and fake therapies that instead of helping to protect against the pathogen do exactly the opposite, damaging health.

Several governments in various countries have tried to act as a filter between the information on the networks and what reaches the Internet user, but it has sometimes been counterproductive.

The most recent example is in France: a few days ago, Sibeth Ndiaye, spokesperson for the government of Emmanuel Macron confirmed that they decided to eliminate the official Désinfox website created at the behest of the Elysée Palace in order to verify which information published by the media was "reliable or not". More than a hundred media outlets protested against this measure, arguing that the government could not become a censor and point a finger at what information was true or not or worthy of being considered by readers.  

After the Syndicat National des Journalists accused Macron of "exceeding its constitutional role and functions" and filing an "urgent" appeal with the Council of State, Ndiaye went on to announce the immediate suspension of the website, which was only intended to "help citizens find reliable information" in the face of the accumulation of data, videos, articles and documents circulating on social networks that are sometimes distorted or altered.

It is curious because from the heart of France a news item has come out that has been reproduced by many media worldwide and shared by WhatsApp millions of times: the story claims that French doctors infer that people who smoke are less likely to catch coronaviruses. The article goes on to say that "nicotine could kill the virus" because only 5% of patients admitted to hospitals in France with COVID-19 are smokers.

Scientific evidence indicates an alveolar destruction in the lungs of patients suffering from pneumonia caused by the coronavirus, which attacks healthy or unhealthy lungs. This point is omitted from the text, which claims that a research study carried out at the Pitié Salpétrière hospital "by its internal medicine team and neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux", who, curiously, has not been directly interviewed by any of the French media.

However, the news has flooded the social networks and has jumped directly to the media that consistently repeat it and some even highlight "the benefits of nicotine" against the coronavirus. Several associations of pulmonologists, in several countries of the world, have had to clarify - presenting their names and positions - that it is fictitious that nicotine generates some benefit related to COVID-19.

A statement signed by Carlos Jiménez, president of the Spanish Society of Pneumology and Thoracic Surgery (SEPAR), underlines the absence of scientific evidence in favour of nicotine as a means of combating the coronavirus. "Smoking is a risk factor that can cause the virus to evolve in a much more serious way in smokers; the virus can have a non-serious evolution in 70% of the cases, but in 20% to 30% it produces bilateral pneumonia, which can lead to severe respiratory failure, which can lead to the ICU and, in the worst case, to death," it is stated in the part.

Under a flood of digital networks, which support even the underworld of communication and give the sewers power of manipulation, the most shared corona hoaxes are related to the methods of the virus propagation, its ways of transmission, the remedies to prevent and cure it, and to the origin of the coronavirus giving rise to multiple conspiracy theories. 

WhatsApp has shared cloned messages from official WHO/PAHO websites, for example, in Peru there was one apparently from the international organisation urging people to chew a 10 gram piece of kion (ginger) "at least once a day" to prevent and cure the coronavirus.

There are so many falsehoods that the United Nations, together with the WHO and PAHO, created a single channel through WhatsApp to address direct questions from people concerned about knowing more about the virus, how to take care of themselves or having doubts about home remedies or medicines; the way to join is through number 41 22 501 76 90.

In various parts of the world, people have died because they read and believe in information that is not true and that reaches them on their phone or is reproduced hundreds of times on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. There have been unfortunate deaths in the United States of people who have taken chloroquine, drunk alcohol or even chlorine directly; other ill-intentioned messages speak of bathing in boiling saunas to "kill the virus" or applying ultraviolet rays directly to the skin.

There have been at the beginning of the pandemic when several nations in Asia and Europe have been forced to perform, in some cases, confinement of their respective populations; more severely in China, Spain, France and Italy less rigid in South Korea, Taiwan, India, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland and New Zealand; then the false news warned that all supermarkets were infected with coronavirus some led to the shortage of toilet paper become the protagonist of the pandemic to its overwhelming demand.

Throughout the days and weeks since the WHO declared the pandemic, last March 11, bad news has not ceased to fall, manipulated, falsified and distorted to keep the reader worried, weakened and equally confused.

In addition to nicotine and coronavirus, another widespread fake news item that has been quite strong in the UK is related to several articles and especially videos in English that blamed the 5G network for being the direct source of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus. "This is the video of a supposed doctor called Thomas Cowan who explains in a conference that the Covid-19 pandemic is caused by the 5G network and that every major pandemic in history has been caused by a quantum leap in the electrification of the Earth. Nothing this person says is real, nor does he have any scientific evidence to support it," the Spanish fact-checking group also makes clear.

The destruction of 5G antennas in various parts of the United Kingdom forced Michael Gove, a cabinet minister, to ask the media to stop "burning or destroying 5G antennas" because it was "nonsense" to link them to the coronavirus or to blame them for the pandemic. It is worth mentioning that the previous Prime Minister, Theresa May, gave her approval for the Chinese Huawei to have the license to operate the 5G fiber throughout the British territory... now the hoaxes have turned the technology into one of their targets.