The government has made a series of imprudent decisions in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. At the beginning, when the public demanded more diagnostic kits to curb the spread of the disease, the government went for the rapid test option despite resistance from medical professional organizations and a WHO statement saying that rapid tests should only be used for epidemiological studies. Despite all the scientific grounding, rapid tests are still widely used in Indonesia.

One of the most controversial episodes was when the Agriculture Ministry introduced its so-called Anti-Corona Necklace, made from eucalyptus extract. The ministry officials claimed it could kill the coronavirus in minutes. It was an entirely unfounded claim without any reliable scientific basis. The product, which was initially planned for mass production, did not even go through clinical trials, nor had it been published in a peer-reviewed journal and thus was met with resistance from the public and scientists.

More recently was the government's initiative to start mass COVID-19 vaccination in November 2020 despite none of the vaccines having passed phase 3 clinical trials and a lack of sufficient publications on safety and efficacy, which means the vaccine has no safety guarantee. Fortunately, the government canceled this plan after heeding the advice of several medical professional organizations not to start mass vaccination until sufficient scientific data on safety and efficacy had been gathered.

This has made it obvious that we are not only fighting the coronavirus pandemic, but also severe misinformation and illiteracy. This has also resulted in many people losing their trust in health workers, accusing them of intentionally seeking financial gain from the pandemic or deliberately increasing the number of COVID-19 patients to multiply revenue.

This finding is not intriguing since research on the World`s Most Literate Nation by Central Connecticut State University in 2016 put Indonesia 60^th out of 61 surveyed nations. Moreover, numerous studies agree that conspiracy theories usually arise as a result of a lack cognitive tools to process logical reasoning. Therefore, scientific illiteracy or misinformation is indeed a severe COVID-19 comorbidity we have to deal with seriously during this pandemic.

Based on a recent survey by Statistics Indonesia (BPS), 17 percent of Indonesians, or around 45 million people, do not believe that COVID-19 exists despite all the scientific evidence. Similarly, in a survey by the University of Indonesia on September, 21 percent of respondents said they believed COVID-19 was a conspiracy of global elites. I believe that almost all medical workers in the field have met at least one person who does not believe in COVID-19.

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