During the height of the pandemic, health officials faced an uphill battle against misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories within the Latin community. A new website from health advocate and radio host Dr. Pablo Rodriguez seeks to address the problem. Nuestrasalud.com, meaning “our health,” is Rhode Island’s first Spanish-language health website. We spoke with him about what this new resource will provide, and how to combat myths about health within the state’s Spanish-speaking communities.
TRANSCRIPT:
Luis Hernandez: What prompted the launch of this website? Was there a moment, or was it a collection of moments? What was it?
Pablo Rodriguez: There was a moment. It was a moment at the beginning of the pandemic when I was newly retired and having a lot of time on my hands to be online. And I became aware of the myriad of conspiracy theories and misinformation that was going on online. I’ve been on the air for over 25 years doing my radio show, my health show. And, you know, I always thought that, you know, just doing radio I would be able to, you know, change people’s minds. But obviously, that was not enough.
Hernandez: I want you to remind people of your background.
Rodriguez: Yeah, so I’m an associate professor of the medical school, The Warren Alpert Medical School [of Brown University], Associate Professor Emeritus. And I am the founder of Latino Public Radio, which was the only public radio station in Spanish in New England for many years, until we couldn’t support it anymore. And I was on the air every day, out of my office, talking about topics of importance to the community, especially related to health, but not exclusively. And I’ve been involved in this community forever. I was chair of the Rhode Island Foundation for a few years. And I’ve been involved in almost everything that has happened in the Latino community in the last 38 years here in Rhode Island.
Hernandez: You know, when the pandemic started, what were some of the questions that you were typically getting from people, you know, in the Latin community, about what they heard, what they were hearing on television, or reading about – or, again, what they were gathering on social media?
Rodriguez: Yeah, the important thing with Latinos is that they receive bad information not just from the United States. So Spanish is a language that’s spoken all over the world. So you get social media posts from Spain, from Mexico, from Colombia, from Chile, all the countries that speak Spanish, and Facebook just pumps it right into your feed if you speak Spanish. And what we know about that content is that 70% of the content in English, Facebook already labeled and banned as misinformation was still getting through in Spanish. And therefore, people were very, very confused. Anywhere from the origins of the virus all the way to whether the vaccine can make you magnetic, which was the most foolish one of the conspiracies. I actually did a video showing people that, you know, there’s no magnetism in the vial where the vaccine is being transported. So there’s so many, you know: using hair dryers to – sucking on a hair dryer to kill the virus; drinking all sorts of contraptions; and people dressed up with white coats and stethoscopes pretending to be doctors. It was like drinking out of a firehose.
Hernandez: I know – I don’t want to make it sound like you know that only Latinos would fall for conspiracy theories, because I’ve seen that in every community. But I wondered, is there something that you see unique about the Latino community in how they handle information?
Rodriguez: When it comes to health, Latinos have a very low level of health literacy. Seventy-four percent of Latinos have low health literacy compared to 36% for the entire population. And when you look at, you know, basic health literacy, 41% of Latinos have no health literacy skills. So anybody that pretends to be authoritative, in terms of a matter related to health, you know, people tend to, to pay attention to it. And this is a huge problem for the United States. It’s not just a problem for the individuals that are exposed to low health literacy. Low health literacy is considered a key source of economic inefficiency in the healthcare system with $238 billion, you know, wasted because people didn’t know how to process the information they received.
Hernandez: How do you have a conversation with somebody when they come to you and they say, “I heard this I read this.” You say, “No, that’s not the case.” But are they open to listening?
Rodriguez: Yes, some people are, you can convince, you can talk because they basically are looking for information, and they heard something and they want, you know, the right answers. But many of them don’t – are not, I mean. And that’s why I created this site, because the site is going to have not just a list of Spanish-speaking providers, which people need, obviously, but a medical encyclopedia. It has, you know, bonafide good information, a list of resources in Spanish, national resources in Spanish, local resources in Spanish for people to access information. So I want this to become a portal for Spanish speaking people in Rhode Island to be able to find the right information and to share it with the world, because that’s the problem. You know, if you try to fix the world one person at a time, it becomes very, very difficult. Even with the radio, you have to be listening to the radio at the right moment, in order for them to hear the message. So I am on the radio, I do a podcast, I do YouTube videos. And I put it all together into this medical portal where you can then access other information that is valuable for your health.
Hernandez: Do you feel though that because, again, a lot of people seem to be getting this misinformation on very specific social media sites, that you should be putting, that that we need to be there all the time, we need to be – maybe we should be on WhatsApp and Facebook all the time to try to battle back?
Rodriguez: Absolutely, absolutely. Because what’s happening is that, you know, the dark forces of misinformation already have discovered the effectiveness of social media in changing the attitudes of the world. We saw it with the pandemic. I love it when I hear people now saying, “you see, the pandemic waw no big deal.” Yes, it was and it is still a big deal, when you have hundreds of thousands of people still dying. So it is a problem. What I’m saying is that they have been successful at it. And we sometimes, you know, believe that, oh, the truth shall set you free, and you know, we’re just, you know, married to the truth, when in reality, if no one hears the truth, then what’s the point of it? We have to be every medium. You know, the new media can’t be just TV, just radio, just online. We have to embrace all sources of media in order to really drive important health care messages.
Hernandez: Besides information, what other resources, or what else will the site provide?
Rodriguez: So the site also has a list of clinical studies that are happening in the state. One of the problems that I encountered when I was working at Women and Infants, and working on research, is that Latinos do not participate in clinical research, because they don’t trust scientists or because they don’t even hear about them. The studies are only published in English. So I translated, you know, a number of studies that are being conducted in the state, and I’m making it available for people to see that they can participate and be part of creating new knowledge about your health and about science. It’s extremely important. The NIH is now really, really pushing for researchers to include diverse communities in their studies because otherwise the studies don’t have any value, if you do not have a cross section of the population participating.
Hernandez: Dr. Rodriguez, it’s been a pleasure. I really do appreciate the conversation.
Rodriguez: Thank you very much for highlighting the work of nuestrasalud.com.
