COVID-19: Fear, quackery, false representations and the law

Highlights

• Pandemics generate fear, anxiety and paranoia that can lead to a number of undesirable community phenomena, including discrimination, scapegoating and predation on the vulnerable

• Literature, religious connotations, film and gaming as shared cultural experiences are replete with emotive tropes relating to pandemics, plagues and pestilences

• An outcome of the emotional resonances of pandemics can be an opportunity for the unscrupulous to take opportunistic advantage by the publication of false claims of prevention, treatment and cure

• State responses to the risk of predatory quackery need to focus on providing calm, reasoned responses to a pandemic such as COVID-19 by provision of scientifically-based, up-to-date information

• Warnings in the form of cease and desist communications should initially be issued to those responsible for promotion of quackery and, as necessary, robust legal action should be initiated against the non-compliant as a public health deterrent.

Abstract

Fear, anxiety and even paranoia can proliferate during a pandemic. Such conditions, even when subclinical, tend to be a product of personal and predispositional factors, as well as shared cultural influences, including religious, literary, film, and gaming, all of which can lead to emotional and less than rational responses. They can render people vulnerable to engage in implausible conspiracy theories about the causes of illness and governmental responses to it. They can also lead people to give credence to simplistic and unscientific misrepresentations about medications and devices which are claimed to prevent, treat or cure disease. In turn such vulnerability creates predatory opportunities for the unscrupulous. This article notes the eruption of quackery during the 1889–1892 Russian Flu and the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu and the emergence during 2020 of spurious claims during the COVID-19 pandemic. It identifies consumer protection strategies and interventions formulated during the 2020 pandemic. Using examples from the United States, Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom, it argues that during a pandemic there is a need for three responses by government to the risks posed by conspiracy theories and false representations: calm, scientifically-based messaging from public health authorities; cease and desist warnings directed toward those making extravagant or inappropriate claims; and the taking of assertive and well publicised legal action against individuals and entities that make false representations in order to protect consumers rendered vulnerable by their emotional responses to the phenomenology of the pandemic.