From Alistair Coleman, Osmington, Dorset, UK
Your look at the lessons learned from the covid-19 pandemic largely missed one crucial aspect – that lockdown was a perfect Petri dish for conspiracy theories and blatant untruths to spread and take root across online platforms, contributing to real-world harms (4 January, p 7).
That lesson hasn’t been learned; media literacy was neglected despite it being an issue long before the pandemic. Long-running mistrust in “experts” plus millions of bored people with instant access to the entire sum of human knowledge (good and bad) led to conspiratorial thought spreading from covid-19 and vaccines to just about anything in the human sphere. I doubt if we can ever roll this back.
