"I have been working for some time with an organisation named EveryDoctor which is a campaigning group with a pro-doctor pro-NHS slant, where I'm normally very much a background figure mostly providing research and strategy guidance, as well as administrating their Facebook presence though The Political Mess, a large private forum for doctors and medical students. As a result of that work we were contacted by a multinational NGO, Avaaz, who really kicked off this examination of COVID-19 based misinformation and coined the term 'infodemic' in order to underpin that.

Just as COVID-19 has brought into stark relief many of the structural inequalities that have burdened so many of our peers and colleagues for so long, it also served to emphasise the risk that viral content and particularly viral misinformation has to damage public health, individuals, and public trust in those measures too. I qualified as a paramedic in 2015, and still work as an Advanced Paramedic Practitioner for NHS 111. That clinical role, and NHS 111 as an entity have bourne a lot of the burden of people seeking health-related information, and so has necessarily bourne the burden of correcting the record around some of those falsehoods. Whether it's people being afraid to go to hospitals, worried they'll be left to die, where exaggerated information and physiological assumptions led people to stop taking their medicines or try damaging 'cures' like pure ethanol. I've seen and felt the impact of that. My colleague and co-panellist Dr Megan Smith also saw the consequences of that at the other end of the spectrum with late-presentations to hospital as a Consultant Anaesthetist in London. Avaaz has been seeking legislative and regulatory change on social media misinformation for some time now and offered us a voice in their campaign after we collectively signed their letter to social media platforms, published in the New York Times. The Parliamentary Select Committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport wanted to consider the merits of making large social media platforms put their money where their mouth is.

Honestly, my inclusion in this particular case was a coincidence. Most of our media contact is with doctors, but in this case, I happened to be well placed to offer a credible voice, and it is something I feel very strongly about. The truth is important, and is what empowers people to make real, credible choices around their health. Lies which spread virally not only limit people in their self-actualisation but are a direct threat to all of our welfare. We need only look at MMR, and the threat posed to misinformation and degradation of trust poses to the successful implementation of any future possible COVID-19 vaccination programme. I was pretty nervous about doing this. I'm a fairly confident speaker, but never like this, never in the halls of power, and never with the possibility of a change in the fundamental structure of how people access healthcare information online. I did it because I was in a strong position to do so and because it felt like the right thing to do. I have long held that caring is a political act, so perhaps by extension this political act felt like an expression of my role in caring."