When fear and misinformation go viral: Pharmacists' role in deterring medication misinformation during the 'infodemic' surrounding COVID-19

Abstract

The world has faced an unprecedented challenge when coronavirus (COVID-19) emerged as a pandemic. Millions of people have contracted the virus and a significant number of them lost their lives, resulting in a tremendous social and economic shock across the globe. Amid the growing burden of the pandemic, there are parallel emergencies that need to be simultaneously tackled: the proliferation of fake medicines, fake news and medication misinformation surrounding COVID-19. Pharmacists are key health professionals with the required skills and training to contribute to the fight against these emergencies. Primarily, they can be a relevant source of accurate and reliable information to the public or other fellow health professionals thereby reducing the spread of COVID-19 medication misinformation. This can be achieved by providing accurate and reliable information based on recommendations given by relevant health authorities and professional associations to make sure the community understand the importance of the message and thus minimise the detrimental consequences of the pandemic. This commentary aims to summarise the existing literature in relation to the promising treatments currently under trial, the perils of falsified medications and medicine-related information and the role of pharmacists in taking a leading role in combating these parallel global emergencies.

Cardiovascular Disease Risk Prevention Services by Pharmacists in Saudi Arabia: What Do Policymakers and Opinion Leaders Think?

“…The stakeholders in this study, as did other stakeholders in previous studies in Saudi Arabia [17][18][19]44], recognised the need to build a better image of community pharmacy to enhance its pro le for engagement by consumers with any pharmacist provided health services. Indeed, during the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic globally, community pharmacy has served an essential service, in managing medicine shortages, extendable supply based on prior histories in chronic conditions and upscaled handling of minor ailments in areas where primary care physician facilities were not operating [45][46][47][48][49][50]. In Saudi Arabia, pharmacists' skills have been fully utilised during the current pandemic to enhance the safety response [51].…”

“…"… the role of healthcare leader is to (a) standardise their work, (b) monitor the quality or output of their work, and (c) evaluate and compare between different sources of information or those of pharmacies with other members of healthcare team." (Pt1, M, [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]Govt. ) "…… The Ministry of Health can have a contract with a third party who is going to assess the quality of services delivered by the pharmacies and then that would be connected with a reimbursement given to such services."…”

Track Iran's national COVID-19 response committee’s major concerns using two-stage unsupervised topic modeling

“…Erku et al [ 28 ] addressed the role of pharmacists in COVID-19 infodemic, providing up-to-date and reliable information to their community via social media platforms. Furthermore, they indicated that pharmacists must ensure the education and qualified homecare for individuals, suspected patients, and family members in the lockdown period even by referrals for the psychological consultant.…”

Efeito das “promessas terapêuticas” sobre os preços de medicamentos em tempos de pandemia

“…Essa propagação de informações sem evidências robustas de eficácia e segurança acarreta um consumo desenfreado e irracional desses medicamentos, colocando em risco não somente a saúde da população, como causando desabastecimento e elevação no preço das ditas "promessas terapêuticas" devido ao aumento da demanda por esses produtos 6 . O cenário de uma crise pandêmica intensifica a comercialização e o uso de medicamentos, 7 contrariando uma esperada retração do consumo verificada quando os preços aumentam, como acontece com os produtos considerados não essenciais. Assim se configura o que a economia caracteriza como baixa elasticidade-preço para os produtos farmacêuticos.…”