Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
A fake account swapped two letters in Brian Druker's name to sell ivermectin for cancer
Brian Druker learned from colleagues that accounts using his name on Facebook and X were pitching ivermectin for cancer, and the remedies his OHSU colleagues offer are all aimed at the readers who see such posts.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Brian Druker developed the drug that turned chronic myeloid leukemia from a death sentence into a manageable condition, and he drives the Knight Cancer Institute initiative at OHSU to end cancer as we know it.
- A fake Facebook account under the name "Brain Druker" was pitching ivermectin as a treatment for various forms of cancer.
- A similar fake account had appeared on X weeks before the Facebook profile surfaced.
- Druker learned of the impersonation when colleagues asked him why he was peddling ivermectin on social media.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure This is partly an institutional problem: an account selling ivermectin under the name of the man who drives OHSU's end-cancer initiative puts a university's reputation behind a treatment claim it never made.
- constraint Name-watching built on exact strings is beaten by a single transposition, so an institution scanning for its scientists' names needs approximate matching to see this class of fake at all.
- decision Someone inside the institution has to own that watch, because otherwise the response clock starts whenever a colleague happens to ask the scientist about a post.
"Brain Druker" differs from "Brian Druker" by one transposition of adjacent letters, so a monitoring query built on the exact string misses it [9]. The phys.org article does not say whether either profile was taken down, or how many people saw the posts [19].
"I spent an entire career based on honesty and integrity," Druker said [6]. He described the impersonation as someone able to "usurp my identity" and undermine "the trust people have in me" [7].
Fabrice Jotterand, who directs the OHSU Center for Ethics in Health Care, said "We live in a post-truth era" [15]. The Druker case is narrower than that. It is a product pitch with a matched credential: a cancer treatment claim under the name of a cancer researcher whose institute runs a campaign to end the disease [3][2].
This is one case, at one institution. A KFF poll found that about a third of adults now turn to artificial intelligence for health information and advice, close to the share who say they turn to social media to inform their medical choices [8]. That figure records where people look, and only that; whether any of them changed a treatment because of what they read is beyond what the poll asked. How often a researcher's name gets cloned is a number nobody keeps.
The three OHSU experts quoted alongside Druker all put the work on the reader. Cliff Coleman, a family medicine professor who sees patients at the university's Richmond Clinic and studies health literacy, said: "The thing that concerns me is the answer you get is delivered with such confidence that it sounds like the truth, when clearly you can't count on that" [10][11]. Establish trust with a patient first, Coleman said, and the patient may then be willing to check claims against a medical librarian, a professional medical association or a public health district's website [17]. Kristin Whitman, head of learning and information services for the OHSU Library, offers two questions instead: why should I trust this information, and what happens if it's wrong [12]. She also recommends lateral reading, which means checking a claim against other sources rather than the page in front of you [14]. "The stakes matter," she said. "If you're looking for the best Italian restaurant in your neighborhood, it's fine" [13].
What to watch
- Whether OHSU or the platforms confirm the Facebook and X profiles came down, and how long they stayed up.
- Whether Facebook or X publish any count of impersonation reports involving named clinicians and researchers.
- Whether KFF's next survey separates people who acted on AI health advice from those who only read it.