Stuart Todd Stolp

Hooper's Hope uses satire and parody to illustrate the similarities between the spread of misinformation through social media and the spread of infectious disease. By viewing our chaotic world through the perspective of germs, the 8-minute animated film highlights the immeasurable contributions of public health science to the welfare of populations around the world. At a time when the science of public health has come under fire due to a number of ideological factors, Hooper's Hope is a wake-up call for the information age, urging the public to think critically and trust in scientific methods as they consume social media.

The ideal viewer is a high school student studying how to filter reliable information from marketing ploys and political propaganda as they utilize digital resources to conduct research. It is also appropriate for public health communication departments and health education publishers as they develop curriculum to advance media literacy education in response to the recently updated National Health Education Standards.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, an overwhelming amount of scientific literature and epidemiological study has documented the role of mis- and disinformation in contributing to poor outcomes of the outbreak in the United States. While improvement in public health communication has been widely cited as a necessary focus, there has been almost no discussion of the need to improve public health literacy curriculum in schools across the country. Very few people are aware that the National Health Education Standards were updated in 2022 with almost no inclusion of lessons learned from the COVID pandemic. Hooper's Hope brings attention to the urgent need to include media literacy education in kindergarten to 12th grade health education curriculum.

The film is complete, although minor edits could be made if requested by an interested party. Hooper's Hope has been selected to be screened at the 2026 American Public Health Association annual conference on November 2 in San Antonio, Texas. As you can see from the film poster, we have screened at a number of public health programs and festivals since the film was first released in October, 2025. We are open to any strategies that might expand its distribution. We are confident that a simple press release to regional news outlets would gain considerable traction, as social media impact on public health has become an exceedingly hot topic across the country. Dr. Stolp has spoken regularly on this topic over the past ten years.