Treating Misinformation Like a Public Health Crisis | Dr. Trevor Arnason

Ottawa's Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Trevor Arnason, joins Jamie and Justin to reflect on what five years of COVID has taught public health units about misinformation. He shares how Ottawa Public Health responded in real time to a false claim about a child's death at CHEO, why the legacy of COVID has made vaccine hesitancy harder to address, and why his team now treats misinformation as a public health issue in its own right rather than a problem tied to any single virus or vaccine.The conversation covers what actually worked during the pandemic: building a trusted social media presence, the underappreciated role of timeliness in countering false claims, and the growing importance of community engagement with populations that don't show up in surveys or on social media. Book recommendation: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari