If people start drinking cyanide in mass, there are definitely a number of important things to study there, including (a) what led them to drink cyanide, (b) wh

If people start drinking cyanide in mass, there are definitely a number of important things to study there, including (a) what led them to drink cyanide, (b) why didn’t they hear or accept counter-messaging advising them that drinking cyanide is a bad idea, (c) what are the effects on the body of drinking various amounts of cyanide, etc. This seems like an invented absurdity, but consider that people in the past few years tried a wide variety of “snake oil” prophylactics/treatments for Covid, including drinking bleach, snorting cocaine, and taking oleandrin (a poison with no known health benefits promoted by officials in the Trump administration), chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine (a malaria treatment), ivermectin (an antiparasitic), etc., even when these had been shown ineffective and were being actively discouraged by health officials. Of even broader impact (hundreds of thousands of extra lives lost in the USA, possibly millions worldwide), many people refused Covid vaccines under a variety of crank theories, driven by a large and organized disinformation campaign. Studying what happened and figuring out how to do better next time should be a significant priority for health research.