Commentary Mendacity is worse than dishonesty. According to one essay on mendacity, “Mendacity connotes a mixture of dishonesty, hypocrisy and audacity.” Mendacity is an important theme of the play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” by Tennessee Williams: “What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity? There ain’t nothing more powerful than the odor of mendacity!” I recently encountered this powerful and obnoxious odor in my email inbox with the arrival of a Medical News and Perspectives from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The title of this bit of medical mendacity is “When Physicians Spread Unscientific Information about COVID-19.” Scientific information is curiously absent from the commentary. Instead, the words “misinformation” and “disinformation” in the body of the work are equated with “unscientific information” in the title. A number of people are accused of spreading misinformation, but no specific examples of scientifically …
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