Editor’s note: This is the final story in a three-part series on health misinformation, vaccine hesitancy and distrust in Idaho. The Idaho Capital Sun interviewed dozens of people, asking how the state ended up on a path to catastrophe — and what, if anything, can turn it around.

State legislators, public health officials, lawyers, health care workers and a media scholar all described one common theme: distrust, fueled by forces within Idaho and beyond.

A strange complaint came into the Idaho Attorney General’s Office in 2000. A business called “Sound Health Society” said it could diagnose medical problems, using only a person’s blood or saliva sample — sent in by fax. It also sold “sound wave” machines to cure terminal illnesses, including cancer.

Idaho’s top consumer protection lawyers opened an investigation. They smeared a bit of ketchup on a piece of paper and faxed it in. The ketchup’s diagnosis: an iron imbalance.

The Idaho Attorney General’s Office later sued Sound Health Society and its now-deceased proprietors from Nampa, among other parties involved in the alleged scheme, saying they violated Idaho’s consumer protection laws and bamboozled “multiple” Idahoans.

Twenty years later, the attorney general’s consumer protection division is one of few blockades against health misinformation in Idaho.

During the pandemic, it investigated people who claimed to have treatments or prophylactics for COVID-19, taking one to court.

Since the pandemic began, Idahoans haven’t...

Read Full Story: https://cdapress.com/news/2021/dec/31/who-do-you-believe/