ArticleAllergy, asthma, and clinical immunology : official journal of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology2020
"Immune Boosting" in the time of COVID: selling immunity on Instagram.
Article in Allergy, asthma, and clinical immunology : official journal of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Anti-masking Posts on Instagram: Content Analysis During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Safety and health at work · 2025Article
- #Fail: the quality and accuracy of nutrition-related information by influential Australian Instagram accounts.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2024Article
- Anthocyanins as Immunomodulatory Dietary Supplements: A Nutraceutical Perspective and Micro-/Nano-Strategies for Enhanced Bioavailability.Nutrients · 2023Review
- Complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine-specific COVID-19 misinformation on social media: A scoping review.Integrative medicine research · 2023Article
- Coping with the COVID-19 pandemic by strengthening immunity as a nonpharmaceutical intervention: A major public health challenge.Health science reports · 2023Article
- The use of herbal and dietary supplements for COVID-19 prevention: A survey among the public in a Malaysian suburban town.Journal of herbal medicine · 2023Article
- Nutrition-Related Information on Instagram: A Content Analysis of Posts by Popular Australian Accounts.Nutrients · 2023Article
- A two-year follow-up: Twitter activity regarding misinformation about spinal manipulation, chiropractic care and boosting immunity during the COVID-19 pandemic.Chiropractic & manual therapies · 2023Article
- Perspectives and practices of dietitians with regards to social/mass media use during the transitions from face-to-face to telenutrition in the time of COVID-19: A cross-sectional survey in 10 Arab countries.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Teaching critical thinking about health information and choices in secondary schools: human-centred design of digital resources.F1000Research · 2023Article
- Navigating the Credibility of Web-Based Information During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Using Mnemonics to Empower the Public to Spot Red Flags in Health Information on the Internet.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Article
- Physicochemical, Mineral and Sensory Characteristics of InstantFoods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Online information on face masks: analysis of websites in Italian and English returned by different search engines.BMJ open · 2021Article
- COVID-19 and Vitamin D Misinformation on YouTube: Content Analysis.JMIR infodemiologyArticle
- The Information Sharing Behaviors of Dietitians and Twitter Users in the Nutrition and COVID-19 Infodemic: Content Analysis Study of Tweets.JMIR infodemiologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
"Immune boosting" is a trending topic during the COVID-19 pandemic. The concept of "immune boosting" is scientifically misleading and often used to market unproven products and therapies. This paper presents an analysis of popular immune-boosting posts from Instagram. Of the sampled posts, all promoted "immune boosting" as beneficial, nearly all involved commercial interests, and many used scientific and medical rhetoric in their messaging.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.