Health Beyond the Blog: “Denying to the Grave”

Denying To the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us (Oxford University Press) was published in 2016, but has deep relevance to our world today. Authors Jack and Sara Gorman, a father-daughter team, look at why people reject health-related information and wisdom. They explore six key factors in science and health denialism: charismatic leaders in these communities,; fear of complexity of the information; confirmation bias and the Internet; fear of conspiracies from both corporations and the government; causality and filling the ignorance gap; and the nature of risk prediction. They use case studies of vaccinations, guns in people’s homes, and overuse of antibiotics, among others, to explore how people make important health related decisions and how scientific and health information can be better conveyed to the public.

With the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and widespread doubt about the vaccine, this book is helpful in providing some insight into why people may have doubts and how we can overcome them.