The chief medical officer for England told a gathering of health leaders that the Radio 4 Today programme helps to legitimise ‘vain’ experts with fringe views.
Speaking at the Nuffield Trust Summit near Windsor this morning he said appearing to give credibility to these opinions can undermine life-saving public health initiatives, such as vaccines.
And he stressed it can be ‘extraordinarily difficult’ to persuade ‘even very clever people’ to change their mind once they have heard wrong but potentially convincing arguments.
Sir Chris said some disinformation is spread by ‘state actors’ trying to ‘cause chaos’ and undermine the government and institutions and some by people with vested commercial interests.
But he added: ‘Some of our colleagues push some of these ideas for reasons, as far as I can see, almost exclusively of vanity.
‘Previously, they are a middle-ranking, perfectly decent clinician or academic.
‘Once they start pushing these they’re invited onto the Today programme. They have a huge following on Twitter. Every time they tweet something out, they get 100,000 likes.