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I would argue that people making decisions on bad 'data' is nothing new. It probably predates the replication crisis by tens of millennia.
People with an intact epistemic immune system (who may or may not be a null set, effectively) should not be affected by this at all, because they will not update their world model upon reading the results of a study or poll (apart from what topics are en vogue right now, perhaps), until they have studied the methodology section of the claim (or it comes from a source which is generally trustworthy, if they have any such sources).
The very idea to study maternal death rates with a 'poll' of all things is already a giant red flag, of course. You might as well try to learn more of the Higgs mass by polling people, real or imaginary -- or LLMs roleplaying Higgs bosons, for that matter. In fact, death rates are one of the few things in the epistemic frontierlands called medicine where I am convinced that good data actually exists. We might not have great data if this or that intervention really helps, but 'how many women die due to pregnancy-related reasons' is the kind of question people have gathered data on before.
Getting good data on that is important. Getting real death rates from hospital reports is vital to know what is going on. Generating AI 'patients' via demographic modelling to respond as to how they trusted their treatment? Much less so. The problem is that the fake polls muddy the waters, which are already muddy enough due to how such data is gathered and what counts as deaths due to pregnancy.
And the huge elephant in the room, the one that the commissioning body of the poll is dancing around, is that in the USA it is African-American maternal mortality bringing up the rates. But you can't say "it's because of unhealthy lifestyles like obesity and high-salt diets", that's racist. So African-American maternal mortality is down to racism, which is down to white doctors treating black patients and not taking their concerns seriously and not giving them appropriate treatment or intervening early enough in high-risk pregnancies. And that's where the fake 'patient' data really makes everything worse. 'People have more trust in doctors and nurses of their own race' would be racist in any other context (imagine saying that for white patients!) but if it leads to "how to solve maternal mortality rates being high? send black women to black doctors!" and that is not, in fact, the solution then we're going to have more deaths and more "it is all the fault of systemic racism, our polls (with fake AI respondents) say so!"
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