By Catherine Wu, global health communications assistant

A July 2026 panel of global health communications experts, including journalists, doctors, a journal editor, and the former director of communications for the World Health Organization (WHO), explored how to convey trustworthy health information amid a rise in disinformation and AI and declining public trust. The Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) hosted the event, Health Communication During Chaotic Times, as part of its Timely Topics in Global Health series. 

“I’ve repeatedly witnessed that bad messaging of health information costs lives, worsens outbreaks, and creates unnecessary stigma,” Michele Barry, MD, CIGH director and senior associate dean of global health, said to open the event. These experiences motivated her to establish the Stanford Global Health Media Fellowship to “train a generation of physicians who could provide trustworthy, factual information to the public in times of medical crisis.” 

The webinar drew on 15 years of fellowship training and a recent Nature Health commentary by 2025 media fellow Neha Mukherjee, a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Gabriella Stern, recently retired WHO director of communications and former journalist at The Wall Street Journal. They were joined on the panel by Omar Ceesay, 2026-27 Global Health Media Fellow and medical student at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and Ben Johnson, PhD, chief editor at Nature Health. Eli Cahan, MD, MSc, an investigative health journalist, Stanford neonatal intensive care fellow, and director of the Stanford Health Equity Media Fellowship, moderated. 

Cahan began by describing the recent erosion of the public’s trust in science institutions, emphasizing that countering misinformation will “take an all-hands-on-deck” approach where “everyone is a potential science communicator.” The panel examined how best to equip these potential communicators to do so effectively. 

Panelists noted that after years of technical training, medical providers often lose patients while speaking in jargon. ‘We forget that we’ve spent years and years training to understand these words, that we just expect our patients to know somehow,’ Mukherjee said.

Mukherjee once witnessed a six-year-old patient’s confusion when a physician asked whether her toes felt “numb.” Instead, the physician could have asked if the child could feel her toes, she said. The medical student has also encountered patients who denied histories of “hypertension” but readily confirmed having high blood pressure — the same condition expressed in everyday terms. Meeting communities where they are, Mukherjee said, could be as simple as returning to plain speech.

Ceesay recalled a parent who refused a new vaccine after their child had an adverse reaction to a prior one. What seems like the most direct solution in such a case — reciting statistics about vaccine efficacy — is not always effective because patient beliefs are often rooted in unaddressed fears or emotions, he said. “Misinformation’s antidote is not always more information,” he added. Instead of immediately citing statistics, Ceesay recommended that healthcare providers acknowledge patients’ fears and honor their emotions “without agreeing with the myth behind the emotions.”

Johnson agreed that more information is not always the answer: “The more information you have available to you, the less confident you are to make decisions,” he said, adding that this is especially true given the sheer volume of information now available online. 

Stern leveraged lessons learned from her time leading communications at the WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic to emphasize that health officials should be cautious of appearing as the “sage on the stage” and sharing knowledge only in a top-down fashion. There is value in listening to – and learning from – the public, she said. For example, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, communities began masking with homemade coverings well before official guidance caught up. This is evidence, Stern said, that “communicating health and science must be a shared journey between experts and laypeople.”

Now, in an era when AI and social media reshape the public’s access to health-related information, the speakers emphasized the importance of trust and the ability to discern fact from fiction. Stern, reflecting on her experiences using agentic AI, warned that the tools frequently “hallucinate” inaccurate information or fabricated sources. She emphasized the need to help the public evaluate what they encounter. “We have to help people push back against the AIs and ask questions and make the AIs recheck and recheck and recheck,” she said.

Furthermore, Johnson noted that general-purpose chatbots face no legal requirements to be safe, accurate, or effective with health questions, and described two efforts by Nature Health in response. The first is to benchmark such tools for safety and accuracy; the second is a plain-language user’s guide to help patients navigate their chatbots more critically.

Rebuilding trust, Ceesay added, begins less with asking why the public doesn’t trust experts, and more with asking how experts can become more trustworthy—through listening, humility, reliability, and empathy.

Many of these strategies and others are detailed further in the Nature Health commentary by Stern and Mukherjee.