Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

> Thacker writes in the introduction, in which he claims that Ventavia unblinded patients, not that “inadvertent unblinding may have occurred”. There’s a huge difference between the two.

The definition of unblinding does not require someone to actually see it.

If a doctor fixes your eyesight, and you refuse to open your eyes afterwards, have you been unblinded?

https://www.noclor.nhs.uk/active-research/unblinding : "Unblinding, sometimes referred to as code-break, is the process by which the treatment/allocation details are made available either purposefully (i.e according to the code-break procedures) or accidently."

If this information was made available - whether or not that information can be proven to be accessed - then an unblinding has occurred.

So to say that they "unblinded" some patients is not wrong. And if the person who found this out should have been blind to the data, then an unblinding access definitely did occur.

And if you're saying that they should have been more precise about this because people in the audience might not be in healthcare and might not know the technical definitions, I'll refer you to the header on the BMJ website: "Intended for healthcare professionals"

> The framing Thacker went with is that the Pfizer vaccine's safety and efficacy are in question due to falsified trials.

That isn't antivax spin. That's just using the correct terminology.

And also, that isn't the framing he went with:

"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."

In nice big letters.

Compare that to Gorski's framing:

"Last week, The BMJ published an “exposé” by Paul Thacker alleging patient unblinding, data falsification, and other wrongdoing by a company running three sites for the massive clinical trial of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. It was a highly biased story embraced by antivaxxers, with a deceptively framed narrative and claims not placed into proper context, leading me to look into the broader question: What the heck happened to The BMJ?"

Exposé in quotation marks. "Embraced by antivaxxers" (not that he is claiming Thacker is one, of course, but blaming the article writer for the kind of people who reads it seems perverse at the least)

Then second paragraph of the introduction: "investigative journalist turned anti-GMO muckraking crank Paul Thacker"

Oof.

(Btw, I'm intentionally not looking Thacker up - don't care who he is or what ad-hominems actually contain truth. Seems like a fools game to me)

So given that, what was Gorski's problem with Thacker's framing?

"Notice the framing. Contrary to Bourla’s statement, the narrative goes, “several” (three, actually, as it turns out) sites in Texas run by Ventavia were supposedly flouting clinical trial safety"

Oh, and that he used the word "Whistleblower" to describe the whistleblower. And that can be misleading, because calling them that (aside from giving them all-important legal protection) might be considered positive in people's eyes.

Thacker using the word "several" which means "more than 3" is definitely wrong, unless he has evidence that the bad science is more widespread than just the three institutes he centers his report on.

And maybe there was a little sloppiness in the language, a little exaggeration in the effects or a little lack of detail in the way he amalgamated his data.

But it's still quite a long article that clearly shows "Ventavia is potentially an irresponsible steward of pharmaceutical trials and Pfizer needs to have greater level of oversight over such contractors".

Or, as Thacker _actually_ put it, 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.

The problem isn’t the content, but rather the audience, and how they react to said content.

People generally don’t read articles - particularly lengthy articles, particularly articles written by academia for academia - they read the headline, perhaps the lead, and then go post and spread their interpretation of the information.

The BMJ have a reputation as being a reputable source of information.

Take these two together, and you have a wavefront of posts claiming that the BMJ agrees that vaccines are dangerous and poorly tested, and the story isn’t what the article holds, it isn’t nuanced, it isn’t moderate, it’s “look, this proves that bill gates wants a microchip in you, and the BMJ confirms it!”.

So, you have a difficult choice. Do you allow a factual article and the reputation of the BMJ to be used as fodder for anti-vaxxer sentiment, or do you try to dampen the squib and decrease the propagation of the distorted interpretations?

If anything, there should perhaps be a middle road, where in order to share or comment on an article, you have to answer a series of questions about what the article says. This would dampen the network effect, and would hopefully ensure that people are actually forced to read the content they’re sharing, rather than relying on a headline and a strapline interpretation added by the sharer.