Can this online game deliver a knock-out blow to anti-vax ‘grifters’?

  • Opinion
  • Professor Sander van der Linden Jon Roozenbeek Ruth Elisabeth Appel
  • 20 August 2025

Modern vaccines have saved over 150 million lives. Yet misinformation about them can still have deadly consequences. A gunman recently opened fire at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, wrongly believing that the coronavirus vaccine had caused his depression.

Public health is increasingly being threatened by the spread of dangerous misinformation. In fact, there have been several recent cases of healthy unvaccinated children who died after contracting the highly contagious measles virus — including in July in Liverpool, UK.

Childhood vaccination rates in the UK are now at their lowest point in over a decade, well below the World Health Organization’s recommended threshold of 95% for herd immunity.

A key question for scientists and public health practitioners alike is how to design interventions that help reduce people’s susceptibility to health misinformation.