A defence of truth

Humans have always thrived on good information and have often suffered from disinformation. Thanks to science and its most pervasive and invasive recent off shoot, social media, we have never had so much of either, and the contrast between salutary and toxic information systems has never been so stark.

Scientists around the world have invented vaccines against Covid-19 in record time and informed government policy, nowhere better than here, to minimise the damage of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. Disinformation in countries where leaders have sought to undermine democracy – from America’s Donald Trump and his allies to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko and their ilk – has caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary Covid deaths on three continents. Even here, disinformation spewing on to social media of anti-vaxxers and “freedom