Misinformation is coming for the anti-HIV jab. Let’s get ahead of it

On your morning social media scroll, I’m sure you’ve seen posts doing what they do best: spreading information that makes you wonder: “Wow, is that really true?” It might even have been on a frequent subject of misinformation: health. Maybe it was a personal story about someone’s sister or neighbour becoming sick after getting the Covid vaccine. Or a post claiming a medication causes the condition it was designed to prevent. Warnings shared thousands of times by people who are scared or confused, not malicious. This is the information environment into which the new HIV prevention medication, lenacapavir or LEN — the extraordinary twice-a-year injection that essentially eliminates the risk of getting HIV — is being introduced. Yet the excitement that we now have a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) product (medicine that prevents someone from getting infected with a germ like HIV before they get exposed to it) with the potential to stop the virus in its tracks doesn’t mean anything if people won’t take it. I’ve spent years studying health behaviour and know that take-up is never guaranteed, even when a health product is effective and widely available. The gap between what a product can do and what communities do with it is where a large part of the fight against epidemics is lost. Misinformation is one of the main culprits in creating the gap. Getting ahead of misinformation on social media about LEN is one way we can help ensure its success. New research that my colleagues Alison Buttenheim, Harsha Thirumurthy and I have just completed with Indlela, the behavioural science unit at Wits University’s Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office (HE²RO), provides a promising way to do just that. What we found In a paper we published in BMJ Global Health earlier this year, we mapped the landscape of emerging concerns and false claims beginning to circulate about a future HIV vaccine. We found recurring claims, including that HIV prevention tools are