Search interest in alleged COVID-19 treatments over the pandemic period: the impact of mass news media

Abstract

Background: Understanding how individuals obtain medical information, especially amid changing guidance, is important for improving outreach and communication strategies. In particular, during a public health emergency, interest in unsafe or illegitimate medications can delay access to appropriate treatments and foster mistrust in the medical system, which can be detrimental at both individual and population levels. It is thus key to understand factors associated with said interest. Methods: We obtained US-based Google Search Trends and Media Cloud data from 2019-2022 to assess the relationship between Internet search interest and media coverage in three purported COVID-19 treatments: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and remdesivir. We first conducted anomaly detection in the treatment-specific search interest data to detect periods of interest above pre-pandemic baseline; we then used multilevel negative binomial regression controlling for political leaning, rurality, and social vulnerability to test for associations between treatment-specific search interest and media coverage. Findings: We observed that interest in hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir peaked early in 2020 and then subsided, while peak interest in ivermectin occurred later but was more sustained. We detected significant associations between media coverage and search interest for all three treatments. The strongest association was observed for ivermectin, in which a single standard deviation increase in media coverage was associated with more than double the search interest (164%, 95% CI: 148, 180), compared to a 109% increase (95% CI: 101, 118) for hydroxychloroquine and a 49% increase (95% CI: 43, 55) for remdesivir. Interpretation: Search interest in purported COVID-19 treatments was significantly associated with contemporaneous media coverage, with the highest impact on interest in ivermectin, a treatment demonstrated to be ineffectual for treating COVID-19 and potentially dangerous if used inappropriately. Funding: This work was funded in part by the US National Institutes of Health and the US National Science Foundation.