Conflicts of interest and the creation of the notion of “health misinformation”: The case of the Molimard Report

Health information is playing an increasingly prominent role in public policy due to the rise of institutional mechanisms designed to combat “misinformation.” Drawing on a critical analysis of the Report on Health Misinformation (January 2026), this article examines the social, institutional, and ideological conditions under which expert discourse on misinformation is produced. Drawing on approaches from the sociology of expertise and the sociology of science, the study combines documentary analysis, analysis of positions and conflicts of interest, and discourse analysis, as well as the use of AI to objectively assess the content of the interviewees’ statements and apply the scoring system proposed by the report to the data itself. The results indicate a high degree of institutional and ideological homogeneity among the actors involved, a near-total disregard for conflicts of interest, and a definition of misinformation that tends to equate any scientific or public criticism with an informational threat. This report illustrates the fabrication of a pseudo-consensus through a major selection bias: The individuals interviewed were recruited through co-optation and opinion steering, thereby eliminating any potential contradiction from the outset. Furthermore, the report’s self-assessment based on its own criteria reveals significant methodological inconsistencies, resulting in a recalculated overall score of 52 out of 100. The article thus suggests that institutional strategies to combat misinformation contribute less to a pluralistic understanding of the scientific debate than to the stabilization of a dominant informational order. In conclusion, it calls for rethinking health misinformation as a relational and political phenomenon, inseparable from power relations, the interests at stake, and contemporary modes of governance of expertise.