The health misinformation crisis is bigger than anyone thought: Most people worldwide believe at least one of 6 common medical myths

For years, the working theory about health misinformation was reassuringly simple: it was a fringe problem, confined to a narrow slice of the population — the deeply partisan, the undereducated, the chronically online. A sweeping new global survey blows that theory apart. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report on Trust and Health, based on responses from more than 16,000 people across 16 countries, found that seven in 10 people worldwide believe at least one of six widely debunked health claims to be true. False claims that survey respondents answered “ I believe this is true ” include: Animal protein is healthier (32%) Fluoride in water is harmful or unhelpful to health (32%) Risk of childhood vaccinations outweighs benefits (31%) Raw milk is healthier than pasteurized (28%) Acetaminophen/paracetamol use during pregnancy causes autism (25%) Vaccines are used for population control (25%) “It’s quite a stunning set of facts,” Richard Edelman , CEO of the global communications firm behind the five-year-old survey, told Fortune . The common assumption, he said, was that skeptics of mainstream health science “are the ones who really have questions about health truths … and it’s not true. It’s everybody.” Not a fringe problem The data systematically dismantles every demographic explanation for why people believe what they do. Among people with a university degree, 69% hold at least one of these beliefs — nearly identical to the 70% of those without one. The beliefs cut across the political spectrum: 78% of right-leaning respondents hold at least one, but so do 64% of those on the left. The pattern holds across age groups and, strikingly, is more pronounced in developing countries than developed ones. The United States, long assumed to be the epicenter of health misinformation, doesn’t even rank in the top half of countries surveyed. courtesy of Edelman “The reality is that there are many divides in how people think about health, both in developed and developing…