Disinformation in infectious diseases

Understanding how information shapes public health conversations

28 September 2026 12.00 - 13.30 CET

You are invited to an upcoming ISAC webinar which will tackle one of the most urgent challenges in global health: the growing impact of disinformation in infectious diseases.

Jon Roozenbeek, Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Influence and Technology Lab, will explore how modern communication technologies shape (mis)belief formation, polarisation, and manipulation in today’s information landscape.

Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, will introduce the VDA Framework, showing how verification, deliberation and accountability can diagnose the health of democratic systems.

Together, they will unpack how misinformation spreads, how democracies drift between meaningful and simulated forms of public discourse, and what these insights mean for safeguarding truth and rebuilding trust in infectious disease communication.

Speaker bios

Eliot Higgins

Talk: Verification, democracy and accountability in a changing information environment

Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat and author of We Are Bellingcat, will speak on the VDA Framework, his analytical model for diagnosing democratic health through the conditions of verification, deliberation, and accountability. Drawing on cases ranging from open-source investigation to the contemporary information environment, he will set out how democracies move between substantial, performative, and simulated forms of these functions, and what the framework implies for protecting and rebuilding democratic life.

Jon Roozenbeek

Talk: The underground manipulation market and its effects on health misinformation

Jon Roozenbeek is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Influence and Technology Lab (ITLab), which sits between Cambridge's Department of Psychology and the Department of Communication Science at the Free University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on (mis)belief formation, intergroup conflict (particularly in Russia and Ukraine), polarisation, underground manipulation markets, and the use and misuse of modern communication technologies. Jon has (co-)authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications and two books with Cambridge University Press: The Psychology of Misinformation (with Sander van der Linden) and Propaganda and Ideology in the Russian-Ukrainian War.

Moderators

Heiman Wertheim

ISAC President Elect Radboud UMC Netherlands

Heiman Wertheim is Professor and Head of Clinical Microbiology at Radboud University Medical Center and chair of the Radboud Center for Infectious Diseases. He previously led OUCRU in Hanoi and has worked extensively on zoonoses, hospital infections, and antimicrobial resistance. He led major AMR initiatives in Vietnam, including establishing a national reference lab and demonstrating CRP testing reduces antibiotic use. He is PI of the ABACUS project, contributes to GAIN, serves on the Dutch Health Council and WHO STAG‑AMR, and has been a WHO consultant in Ukraine since 2024.

Prof. Souha Kanj

ISAC President

Souha Kanj is Professor of Medicine at the American University of Beirut, Faculty of Medicine, Lebanon where she previously led the Division of Infectious Diseases and now chairs the Infection Control Program. She is a Consultant Professor at Duke University, where she trained in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. Author of over 320 publications, she advises the WHO on antimicrobial resistance, infection control, and fungal infections. She serves on editorial boards including Lancet and Mayo Clinic Proceedings. A fellow of major societies, she is President of the Lebanese Society of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology and of the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.