Note to my Yarns from the Farm readers—this is a new series for our local newspaper. I hope you enjoy it. Nan
Is the following claim, made in early January of this year, true? ‘Zinc supplements can protect against COVID-19; zinc kills the virus, and zinc ionophores are a zinc delivery system that allows zinc to go from outside the cell to inside the cell.’
Although it’s plausible, it’s unsupported by any evidence in humans. It is being promoted online by a family physician, Vladimir Zelenko, who is selling a dietary supplement called Z-Stack. He cites a 2010 paper (hence well before COVID-19) as evidence. Although the paper found that the combination of zinc and a zinc ionophore limited replication of those earlier types of coronavirus cells in a lab, there is no evidence that this combination works in humans. (See https://healthfeedback.org for the full discussion of this claim.)
Zelenko is (literally) selling disinformation. Zinc, while a useful dietary supplement, is not a cure for COVID-19, and because it is a heavy metal, could damage your health if taken in large quantities. So the damage to you is potentially two-fold—from the zinc itself if taken in excess, and from the higher chance of getting severe COVID-19 if you substitute zinc for vaccination.
This has all the hallmarks of classic disinformation: people spreading often plausible untruths deliberately and for their own ultimate benefit, be it financial, emotional, or just raw power.
Over the next few months, we’ll analyse claims like these, figure out who is benefitting, what the deceit is at the heart of the scam and how it is presented in a way that draws us in.
Deceit on a social scale is nothing new for humans.Think, for instance, of the Trojan horse—definitely designed to benefit the Spartan invaders, not the Trojan recipients of the gift. The story did not end well for the city of Troy.
Humans are easily deceived, perhaps because we often want things to be true that aren’t. In the story of the Trojan horse, the people of Troy wanted to believe the story the Spartans spun—that they were ending their long siege of Troy, and the horse was a parting gift. Only Cassandra, the Trojan seeress, was not taken in by the ruse, and then only because her superpower was predicting the future, not because she fact-checked the Spartans’ promised departure.
This powerful human impulse to believe something because we want it to be true is a gift to scammers and grifters of all sorts, and is as effective today as it was in the Bronze Age.
A few relatively simple tools can help you avoid harm whenever you are faced with information that you aren’t (or shouldn’t be) confident about. For example, if someone offers you a free horse:
Question everything. Don’t assume that your gift horse is actually a real animal, or a real gift. Look carefully into its mouth.
Be objective. Just because you were hoping for a horse, don’t let that sway you into accepting this one without careful assessment.
Look critically at the information you are assessing. Is it likely that a gift horse would really be that big and run on wheels?
Find sources you can trust to give you unbiased assessment of the information you are questioning.
Take into account the reliability of source of the information. If you conclude it’s a scam gift horse, you can decline it, you can challenge the giver, you can, like Cassandra, suggest that your fellow citizens not be taken in by it. Whatever you choose, though, don’t let yourself become part of the misinformation chain by repeating the information to others before you are sure of its validity.