“For 30 days now, I didn’t come across a single piece of misinformation as WhatsApp forward,” she says.

Selected under India’s National Health Mission, ASHA workers are women who care for about 1,000 people within their village.

Kamble is the ASHA worker for the 701 people living in the remote village of Bolakewadi in Western India’s Maharashtra state.

Kamble began investigating and found that “fasting cures COVID” was a misinformation message forwarded multiple times in the vernacular language Marathi on village WhatsApp groups.

A lot of people in fact did try it.” She started sourcing scientific messages from doctors and began messaging about COVID treatments that actually worked.

Eventually, she says, people realized cow urine is no cure for COVID.

Kamble isn’t the only ASHA worker using WhatsApp to curb misinformation.

“When we distributed COVID awareness pamphlets, people threw them [away].

“When unscientific messages go viral, I dial up at least three COVID doctors and confirm all the facts,” she says.

In addition to combating misinformation over WhatsApp, they also make an effort to bust misinformation during their surveys of their community so they can reach people without internet access.

In Kolhapur’s Pernoli village of 2,265 residents, two people died within a few days of the vaccination.

They probed these deaths and found both people were asthmatic and COVID positive — and that they hadn’t received reputable care.

As COVID cases kept increasing across the hinterlands, several villagers decided to swarm the local temple for a “community prayer.” Kamble started messaging that even if a single person tests COVID positive, it could lead to community transmission.

As a result of the faulty readings, many people refrain from getting their oxygen levels tested.

The patient’s oxygen level was diagnosed to be lower.

“Less oxygen doesn’t always mean COVID, and people don’t even know what the normal oxygen level is,” Kamble says.

She found a graphic representing the required oxygen level and put it up as a WhatsApp status.

She sent the same photo to multiple WhatsApp groups, eventually reaching over 500 people directly.

“The same family now asks me to monitor the oxygen level daily.” For something as simple as checking oxygen, Kamble was forced to spend several hours working to counter misinformation on WhatsApp.

“There are many people who thank us for asking them to get vaccinated,” says Kodak.

While some people in the area tested COVID positive, none were hospitalized, vindicating the ASHAs’ vaccination campaign.

While surveying, we spend at least three hours every day countering such misinformation,” Kamble says

While misinformation in her own village has slowed, the list of pseudoscientific messages continues ricocheting around WhatsApp groups in other areas of the country