Health, inequality and the information environment
I am a researcher (BE-FOR-ERC grant) at the Sapienza University of Rome. I was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) and a postdoctoral fellow at Bocconi University, where I also obtained my PhD in Health Economics and Public Policy.
I study how health, inequality and information shape one another, using observational, administrative and digital data. My past work looked at how health misinformation spreads online, how it fuels resistance to public health measures (REMEDY), and why health and care differ across places and social groups. My current project, PRISMI, asks how populations build resilience to science mis- and disinformation.
Population ResIlience to Science MIs/disinformation: Identity, Collective Memory, and Institutional Choices (PRISMI)
Scientific mis- and disinformation shape how individuals perceive health and climate risks and how societies respond through policy compliance, collective action, and trust in public institutions. Yet their consequences are strikingly uneven across countries, in ways that measured beliefs do not predict. While existing research emphasises cognitive biases and digital platform dynamics, far less attention has been paid to the structural forces that systematically expose certain social groups to greater informational risk, and to the conditions that build societal resilience.
PRISMI shifts the focus from mitigation — correcting single claims — to fostering population resilience, understood as the ability to discriminate among claims, sources and institutions rather than to accept or reject them as a class. This capacity is unequally produced, transmitted and protected, and the project examines each in turn.
Individual and regionHow resilience is producedMultilevel and structural equation models link regional inequality and identity to discernment, with NLP on multilingual corpora measuring identity framing.
Family and communityHow it is transmittedFactorial randomised experiments activate memories of information control across familial and community registers.
InstitutionsHow it is protectedComparative coding of regulatory, platform and governance instruments across contrasting information regimes.
The three levels at which PRISMI studies resilience, and the methods used at each.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship, INED
The Effect of Resistance to Epidemic Measures on Disease Spread and Mortality: What’s the Role of Online Misinformation? (REMEDY)
Non-pharmaceutical interventions — social distancing, self-isolation and vaccination — proved central to the response to COVID-19, yet a fundamental challenge for public health was generalised opposition to these measures, sometimes fomented by news media, influential figures, extremist politicians and misinformation circulating online. Little is known about how such messages propagate and how they shape behavioural opposition that ultimately leads to higher morbidity and mortality.
Online misinformation
Aim 2
Resistance to epidemic measuresvaccination, masks, distancing, mobility limits
Determinants of resistancedemographic, socioeconomic, political
REMEDY’s two empirical aims, and the theoretical framework for who resists and why.
Using real-world observational data, new digital records of human interaction and social science methods, REMEDY sets out to establish two associations: the effect of public resistance to epidemic measures on disease spread, hospitalisation and excess mortality; and the effect of online misinformation on behavioural opposition to those measures. It also develops a theoretical framework for the demographic, socioeconomic and political determinants of non-compliance.
Background and objectives
Theoretical models and simulations have begun to explore the consequences of non-compliance. Decision-analytic modelling suggests that removing NPIs while vaccines are distributed may substantially increase infections, hospitalisations and deaths; a survey of about 7,500 people in eight countries found a nearly tenfold difference in additional mortality between countries with low and high adherence; and work by Basellini and colleagues using digital-trace mobility data showed that excess deaths in England and Wales during the first wave could have doubled without mobility restrictions.
It remains unclear why populations respond so differently. Physicians, social networks, and traditional and social media all shape information intake, and while the roles of physicians and peers are well studied, the real-world behavioural effect of online misinformation is not. REMEDY aims to provide systematic empirical evidence and a theoretical framework linking online misinformation, non-compliance and epidemic outcomes.