The Social Science Research Council in Brooklyn, New York, has announced the launch of the Mercury Project, a three-year, $10 million investment in efforts to address the growing threat of mis- and disinformation on public health in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With $7.5 million in seed funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and additional funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the project will fund efforts to quantify the scope of the problem and its impact on society, as well as identify tools, methods, and interventions that better support people’s health across nations. To that end, the initiative will fund projects in the United States, Africa, Asia, and Latin America for up to three years, with a focus on solutions that create equity in access to health information, interventions that remove obstacles people face when trying to access reliable health information, and effective approaches to increasing COVID-19 vaccination efforts that will inform future vaccine uptake efforts.

In response to calls from the World Health Organization, the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General, and the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, the Mercury Project will highlight the critical role communications and community engagement play in ensuring the success of global public health programs.

“This pandemic has revealed the real and physical risks that mis- and disinformation in our media environment pose to us all. Currently we lack knowledge about cost-effective interventions that may be able to counter the effects of mis- and dis-information, and support the uptake of reliable and accurate information,” said SSRC president Anna Harvey. “But evidence, data, and collaboration are cornerstones to solving many of society’s global issues, and the researchers in the Mercury Project consortium will lay the groundwork to improve public health now and for decades to come.”

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