As the coronavirus pandemic has left us in tatters and
still spreading fast, the World Health Organization gave a warning about a very new disease, Infodemic, which spreads on social media like fire, news agency AFP reported.

Infodemic is a wave of fake news and misinformation
which is very dangerous and unknown to all. As we all are expecting for
COVID-19 vaccines very soon, the experts of WHO are cautioning the same
infodemic may endanger the rollout of immunisation programmes which are being
develop to end this life threatening pandemic.

Social media is a boon as well as bane to our society
and this pandemic has proved this. “More people staying at home during this
pandemic are using the technology and social media to a huge extent to keep
themselves and their close ones healthy, safe and connected”, the WHO said.

“On
the contrary, the same technology and social media are giving green signals to
the flow of infodemic. They are generating some deadly ways to deal with this
pandemic”.

The WHO states an infodemic is a plethora of
information and misinformation in an online and offline mode. There are
deliberate attempts to disseminate wrong information. Last month, a study from
Cornell University in the United States found out, US President Donald Trump
has been the biggest spreader of COVID-19 misinformation during this pandemic
worldwide.

Read more: Novel coronavirus mutations have no effect on transmissibility: Study

This year in April, Trump even pondered of using disinfectants
inside the body as a remedy to cure the virus and also brought arguable
treatments.

Since January, AFP has published more than 2,000
fact-checking articles dismantling the false claims about the coronavirus
pandemic. “Due to the lack of right and trustworthy information, nobody takes
diagnostics tests, immunization campaigns do not reach to people and the virus
continue to spread at their high rate”, the WHO said.

Read more: After a year-long battle with virus, COVID-19 vaccines on the cusp of release

Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Youtube are the
biggest platform for spreading of misinformation. With the three vaccine
developers- Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca/Oxford University developing
the valuable vaccine, there is a high chance that these social media platforms
will create some misguiding and fake facts about the vaccines, said Sylvain
Delouvee, a researcher in Social Psychology at Rennes-2 University.

This huge flow of misinformation is based on growing
distrust of all institutional authority, be it government or scientific.