Abstract
Internet misinformation and government-sponsored disinformation campaigns have been criticized for their presumed/hypothesized role in worsening the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We hypothesize that these government-sponsored disinformation campaigns have been positively associated with infectious disease epidemics, including COVID-19, over the last two decades. By integrating global surveys from the Digital Society Project, Global Burden of Disease, and other data sources across 149 countries for the period 2001-2019, we examined the association between government-sponsored disinformation and the spread of respiratory infections before the COVID-19 outbreak. Then, building on those results, we applied a negative binomial regression model to estimate the associations between government-sponsored disinformation and the confirmed cases and deaths related to COVID-19 during the first 300 days of the outbreak in each country and before vaccination began. After controlling for climatic, public health, socioeconomic, and political factors, we found that government-sponsored disinformation was significantly associated with the incidence and prevalence percentages of respiratory infections in susceptible populations during the period 2001-2019. The results also show that disinformation is significantly associated with the incidence rate ratio (IRR) of cases of COVID-19. The findings imply that governments may contain the damage associated with pandemics by ending their sponsorship of disinformation campaigns.