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Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#391

Post by invisible »

NoPie wrote: post #362
angry_octet wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re saying is true, and completely tangential to the problem. When you are concerned that validation done by a subcontractor might be weak, it is entirely sensible that you subdivide the work. What we need is a statistical reanalysis that considers that, e.g., 10% of each step is done wrongly. And a regulatory regime that doesn’t hand wave away complaints, has rigorous protection for whistleblowers, and serio…

It will not be misunderstood by intended readers of BMJ. As for facebook it has all kinds of readers and groups including those that are meant for professionals.

I think I completely understand the article but still think that it's editorializing facts. Why exactly would professionals feel differently? If they had done some investigations themselves and found a series of poor contractors that all reported similar issues, I think we could take this as much more concerning. This looks like a director from a single company and a few anonymous researchers at the same company came forward with bad practices for 1000 trials.

Also, as the article points out, investigations were performed at other contractors. Wild speculation, but that could be that Pfizer didn't even need a full 44k and they just ignored 1k? (For example, they concluded the trial with 41k getting a second dose.)

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#392

Post by NoPie »

HideousKojima wrote: post #333
tlogan wrote: post #301

I wonder what is BMJ’s agenda? Why do they want that their articles explaining how one contractor botched trial shared on Facebook? Are they saying that it is not true that their article “could mislead people”? And article is like Fox News: “ Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory ove…

>And article is like Fox News: “ Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight.” I mean, shouldn't it? The fact that this was reported to the FDA and they took no further action to investigate makes all of their other efforts suspect.

Or it means that FDA is not doing its job properly. It could be do to lack of manpower or whatever but the fact that the FDA did not inspect the sites in question doesn't mean that the complaint wasn't justified. It just means it wasn't investigated, so no clear conclusions can be made.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#393

Post by rabite »

superflit2 wrote: post #363
spaniard89277 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians. Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff. The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in t…

Well... Who owns the Media then?

cool it with the anti-semitic remarks

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#394

Post by fallingknife »

ninkendo wrote: post #32

It seems to me that if you have a whistleblower account of some poor research practices for a vaccine trial, spreading it around Facebook to be commented on by random people who have no idea how to interpret it, probably isn't the best place for it. I know that means publications like these which may have something important to add to the vaccine conversation, won't be able to have millions of "likes and shares"... b…

Yes, let's do it the old fashioned way where a bunch of journalists at "actual news sites" who think they're smarter than me but aren't, and have no subject matter knowledge whatsoever, decide for me what information I should get to see.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#395

Post by throw10920 »

threatofrain wrote: post #372
throw10920 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A government that censors the press is also not preventing anyone from speaking to me; they are refraining from giving some sources a megaphone." "refraining from giving some sources a megaphone" is exactly equivalent to "censorship". There's no difference. Your argument confuses the prescriptive and the descriptive. Descriptively, yes, Facebook is under no legal obligation to treat speech on its platform equally. P…

A government which bans someone from speaking is preventing someone from talking to you. The government need not even consider the mode by which information is transmitted, or who is paying for these transmissions. If I am banned from sharing information such as classified intel, there is no means by which I am permitted to communicate this to you. A government which bans things also carries the force of government,…

> A government which bans someone from speaking is preventing someone from talking to you.

I didn't say "prevents someone from speaking" - I specifically said "censors the press" because those are two very different cases (and because that's the exact language that GP used). A government could censor the press but not prevent private individuals from speaking to each other, so it wouldn't technically be preventing people from speaking - but it's pretty clear that it's still engaging in censorship (which was the point I was making to GP).

> If I am banned from sharing information such as classified intel

Classified material isn't covered under free speech. Free speech protects sentiment and expression. Classified information isn't sentiment, it's factual data, and it's protected for national security reasons, so as long as the material is classified for that reason, and not, say, to hide the embarrassment of a government official (which is illegal in the US at least), it's pretty clear that it's not free speech.

> A public square is one which is funded and governed by public means

I disagree. A "public square" is a forum for expression that appears to be open to all, styles itself as a public square, and has a substantial population in it. The CEO of Twitter, for instance, implied that Twitter is a public square[1].

> As a matter of prescription, why would we ever want Facebook to be the financially responsible party for public town squares?

Aha, that's a good question - we don't! Or, I don't - the problem is that it is a de-facto town square already, not that I want it to be (a regulated) one. Top of my wish-list is for it to not be that - for the DoJ to take it apart and/or force them to make it trivially easy to move your Facebook data somewhere else. (I suspect you share this sentiment) Unfortunately, because the DoJ appears to have lost its fangs over the past few decades, we're stuck with the Facebook behemoth - so, if we're stuck with it anyway, it's morally right for them to adhere to free-speech principles.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/09/05/jack-dorsey-twitter-us...

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#396

Post by fallingknife »

ospzfmbbzr wrote: post #200

Fact checking is the business of publicly labeling as false those narratives that people with real power already viewed negatively. It becomes necessary when you lie all the time. The whole notion of fact checkers is laughable -- who pays them? Do they still get paid if they 'fact check' their benefactors? There is no debate. There is no invitation for refutation. It's propaganda.

Yeah, this exactly. Wonder why there were no "misinformation" bans for the MSM companies that repeatedly reported on unconfirmed, and later disproved rumors about Russiagate.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#397

Post by srcreigh »

invisible wrote: post #178
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #45

This one is much trickier than it looks. Reposting user nojito's post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596111 ), but here in a top level comment: > The fact check was correct in this instance though? > https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis... > The conclusions in the original BMJ article make zero sense when actually scrutinized. > https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 Please read b…

I've read over both sides of this, and there is some editorializing going on in this medical journal that makes it less about facts. The title makes no mention of Ventavia, but instead mentions Pfizer. The headline doesn't specify that Ventavia managed 1/44th of the trial, nor anything factual (mostly speculation that the data integrity is questionable). > Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company…

I guess it's not so hard to believe you're getting downvoted by shedding light on a situation about censorship.

The first question in everybody's head when reading this article is, "Were the vaccine trials legitimate or not?"

BMJ does not even come close to truthfully answering this question. With their authority as a medical journal and a very limited amount of evidence, they give a clear and incorrect impression that the vaccine trials were not legitimate.

Do they report on the limitations of their evidence? No. Do they report on the perspective of employees at other trial sites? No. Do they get quotes from Pfizer, other health orgs, Ventavia executives? No. Do they report about other speculative factors at play from Ventavia ex-employees? No.

Are they purposefully hiding new relevant information? Yes. They leaked in their own article that the FDA is aware and reviewed the Ventavia trial.

> An FDA review memorandum released in August this year states that across the full trial swabs were not taken from 477 people with suspected cases of symptomatic covid-19.

After insinuating earlier that there is a complete lack of oversight.

> “There’s just a complete lack of oversight of contract research organisations and independent clinical research facilities,” says Jill Fisher, professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and author of Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials.

Honestly, BMJ seems to be working very hard to lie using true facts. I have no objections to their articles being marked as false.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#398

Post by NoPie »

invisible wrote: post #391
NoPie wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will not be misunderstood by intended readers of BMJ. As for facebook it has all kinds of readers and groups including those that are meant for professionals.

I think I completely understand the article but still think that it's editorializing facts. Why exactly would professionals feel differently? If they had done some investigations themselves and found a series of poor contractors that all reported similar issues, I think we could take this as much more concerning. This looks like a director from a single company and a few anonymous researchers at the same company came…

The issue is that proper investigation was not done. We need more transparency and this is not what is happening. What happened with the data from these researchers? There are no indications that they were removed from the study analysis. If the problems with this one researcher is swept under carpet, how do we know that there are not number of other researchers with different problems?

Without this vigilance how do you distinguish between ivermectin studies that showed a positive effect and vaccine studies? Some of ivermectin studies but not all were discovered to be total frauds. At some point when you see too many problems you just have to distrust them by default until proved otherwise.

In fact, I think that there is possibility that the Pfizer vaccine trial results turned out quite different from effectiveness in real life in part due to issues like this.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#399

Post by fallingknife »

yosito wrote: post #122
endisneigh wrote: post #22

Is fact checking that difficult? Imagine a forum that works in the following way: 1. You post similar to here. 2. Any post that has a claim is flagged. The poster, or another commenter has 24 hours (or some time period) to link to both a page and specific text (similar to how Google highlights search text when visiting a link) that supports the claim. 3. Once a claim is attached, posters can vote and downvote how wel…

First of all, even genuine, sincere upvotes and downvotes are not a reliable way to evaluate truth. Second, even if they were, such a system could easily be gamed by parties with political interests.

Well, yes it could easily be gamed by parties with political interests, but FB's system of fact checking is parties with political interests.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#400

Post by HideousKojima »

NoPie wrote: post #392
HideousKojima wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And article is like Fox News: “ Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight.” I mean, shouldn't it? The fact that this was reported to the FDA and they took no further action to investigate makes all of their other efforts suspect.

Or it means that FDA is not doing its job properly. It could be do to lack of manpower or whatever but the fact that the FDA did not inspect the sites in question doesn't mean that the complaint wasn't justified. It just means it wasn't investigated, so no clear conclusions can be made.

>Or it means that FDA is not doing its job properly.

So you're saying it "raise[s] questions about... regulatory oversight"?

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