A catalog of tools, trainings, frameworks and reading for anyone taking on infodemic management as a job. Most of it was assembled between 2021 and 2024, out of the WHO work I led and the trainings and conferences around it, and it is scoped to that period.
If you’re new to health misinformation and infodemic management, read or watch these first
- Infodemic management in 21st Century a chapter I coauthored for the open-access book Managing infodemics in the 21st Century
- Neville Calleja – infodemic management @ 10000m (video)
- Introduction to Africa Infodemic Response Alliance (video) and their web site
- Information ecosystem and infodemic management (video) – a talk I delivered with Surangani Abeyesekera from UNICEF in 2022
- Podcast interview Lis Wilhelm and I did for Issues in Science and Technology (NASEM)
- Podcast interview I did for Pulse IT
- see also a series of blogs I published on the public health challenge of the information environment
Infodemic management trainings and online courses (for the practitioner)
- WHO’s infodemic management channel on OpenWHO.org – to see an infodemic manager’s systemic and public health approach to misinformation, take Addressing health misinformation
- Free lectures and resources from the Third WHO infodemic management training
- Free lectures from the GAVI/WHO/UNICEF/US CDC comprehensive training on vaccine demand (2022) – budding infodemic managers in the vaccine space will need not only skills in the information environment, social listening, and health misinformation, but also understand social determinant of health, behavioral models, human-centered design, and evaluation approaches.
- Canadian Public Health Association’s course on Building Vaccine Confidence and Demand in a Digital Information Age
Peer-reviewed journal articles on aspects of infodemic management
- Measuring the Burden of Infodemics: Summary of the Methods and Results of the Fifth WHO Infodemic Management Conference
- social network analysis and modelling of social ties at scale can inform global and local influences to how people exchange information — see Neil F Johnson‘s paper on examining pro and antivaccination views (2020), and resilience, distrust and information ecosystem (2023)
- Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media
- Briony Swire-Thompson and David Lazer’s Reducing Health Misinformation in Science: A Call to Arms and Public Health and Online Misinformation: Challenges and Recommendations
- Kozyreva, A., Lorenz-Spreen, P., Herzog, S.M. et al. Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation. Nat Hum Behav (2024).
Key commentaries and news articles about information environment, infodemic management and health misinformation
- Report on Navigating infodemics and building trust during public health from 2023 NASEM workshop
- Report on Understanding and addressing misinformation about science
- Issues in Science and Technology: Claire Wardle’s Misunderstanding misinformation and David Scales’ letter to editor on her article
- journalistsresource.org: 5 tips for avoiding mistakes in news headlines about health and medical research
- psychiatrist.com: TikTok’s ‘Undiagnosis’ Trend Spreads Misleading Mental Health Advice
- New York Times: How Fake Science Sells Wellness
- The New Yorker: Medicine’s problem with Wellness
- Times of India: Govt issues additional guidelines on disclosures for health and wellness influencers
- The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Assessing national information ecosystems
Tools and how-tos for infodemic management
- WHO/UNICEF How to build an infodemic insights report in 2 steps
- USAID/InterNews: Inequity Driven Mistrust: Its Impacts to Infodemic Management and Health Response and what to do about it
- FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial
- Tools That Fight Disinformation Online
- Public health taxonomy for social listening on respiratory pathogens
- UNESCO/Liiv center digital anthropology toolkit
- WHO/University of Sydney toolkit to measure information exposure
- Infodemic management for supporting mass gatherings
Internews/Rooted In Trust: Information ecosystem preparedness for health emergency response and Inequity driven mistrust: Its Impacts to Infodemic Management and
Health Response and what to do about itHarvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Center for Health Communication’s Digital Safety Kit for Public Health
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security’s Practice-Oriented Playbook for Addressing Health Misinformation
- Understanding community information needs through stories (Brown Univ)
THE SPARS PANDEMIC 2025 – 2028; A Futuristic Scenario for Public Health Risk Communicators. JHO’s Center for Health Security.
Games for social inoculation and resilience building
Examples of infodemic management from countries
- Nigeria – from the Nigeria CDC (Bassey Bassey Okposen)
- Indonesia (video) – from MAFINDO and their social listening project (Santi Indra Astuti), and an article about the social inoculation and hoaxbusting activities
- Ghana – social listening project and using radio dramas on WhatsApp
- UK – effective public health communicaiton about vaccines (Cherstyn Hurley)
- New York City Health department
- Finland – integrating social listening, community engagmeent and pandemic response
- Germany – National Institute of Public Health – Robert Koch Institute
- Canada – Immunize Canada (video)
- Sri Lanka – social listening from Sri Lankan infodemic manager
- health worker network in Ireland during COVID-19 (video)
- #thisisourshot health worker network in the US and Canada (video)
- international: InterNews/USAID program “Rooted in Trust”
- Pang M, Zhang Y, Guo S, Yang X, Qi X. Global Overview and Insights on Infodemiology and Infodemic Management. China CDC Wkly. 2023 Jun 30;5(26):579-583. doi: 10.46234/ccdcw2023.112. PMID: 37457849; PMCID: PMC10346098.
Public health frameworks and tools that have integrated infodemic management or infodemic insights
- WHO Emergency Response Framework 2.1
- WHO’s Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats – a tool to help countries review and update national pandemic preparedness plans
- WHO’s Strengthening the global architecture for health emergency prevention, preparedness, response and resilience
- WHO’s Pandemic influenza preparedness framework: partnership contribution high-level implementation plan III 2024-2030
- WHO’s Public health resource pack for countries experiencing outbreaks of influenza in animals
- Operational framework for demand promotion- integration of COVID-19 vaccination into routine immunization and primary health care – by WHO, GAVI, UNICEF and partners
- ECDC’s Core competencies for EU public health epidemiologists in communicable disease surveillance and response
- A checklist for respiratory pathogen pandemic preparedness planning
Joint external evaluation tool: International Health Regulations (2005) – third edition
- WHO benchmarks for strengthening health emergency capacities
- IHR benchmark – 16c infodemic management
- Mainstreaming infodemic management in learning and teaching programmes: a report from a WHO technical consultation, 21–23 March 2023, Belgrade, Serbia
Where to look for news and opportunities in infodemic management
What came after
My own work has since moved toward the wider information environment and how health systems earn trust inside it, in ordinary care as much as in emergencies. Those pages are here: