Meet the medical experts debunking COVID misinformation on TikTok

Meet The Medical Experts Debunking COVID Misinformation On TikTok

Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, joined TikTok at the start of the pandemic for the same reason we all did: She was bored and got sucked into the app’s endless scroll of funny dog and cat videos and viral trends.

Unfortunately, in between clips of people’s feta pasta and dance challenges, she saw a ton of COVID-19 misinformation.

“As an epidemiologist who is trained on how to read the scientific literature and data, I just couldn’t let it go unchecked without trying to set the record straight,” said Wallace, who goes by @epidemiologistkat on TikTok.

She started debunking the wildest claims, and soon, her follower count and the number of views on her videos began to grow massively. She currently has over 194,000 followers and counting.

Wallace is one of many medical professionals and scientists using TikTok to unpack vaccine news and debunk myths (which are plentiful on the platform). Sometimes this is done through straight fact-checking videos, sometimes through trending TikTok dances and lip-syncs.

“I’ll get a message from someone who lives in a small town where no one wears a mask, and they will tell me that I’m the only person that makes them feel sane,” she said. “The people who let me know I’m making a difference mean the world to me, and motivate me to keep going.”

HuffPost chatted with Wallace and several other medical practitioners and scientists who are using TikTok to educate the general public.

As a few conservative Democrats remain at odds with the party over how much to spend on President Joe Biden’s agenda, Pelosi said this week that Democrats will likely need to slim down their ambitions for the reconciliation bill. But progressives prefer a different approach: If the bill is going to be smaller, then they prefer to pass shorter-term safety net expansions, instead of jettisoning of entire sections of the legislation.

Officials in Georgia’s most populous county, where election operations are already under review by the state, have fired two workers accused of shredding paper voter registration applications, according to a county statement released Monday. Preliminary information indicates that the employees checked out batches of applications for processing, and they are alleged to have shredded some of the forms, the Fulton County statement says. Fellow employees reported the alleged actions to their supervisor Friday morning, and the two employees were fired that day.

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