Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

In my country there is no media I believe less than the fact-checking one, officially given to friends of my current government to the wife of one of the most well-known people in Spain, for its channel "La Sexta", her name is Ana Pastor, wife of Ferreras.

Besides controlling the media nearly as a monopoly, they receive favors from government like public money, when they are supposed to be private media. Same for Cadena Ser, for which there are jokes as "the most public private radio ever".

All this, at least in Spain, are the same people and I consider it basically a layer of corruption with the tax payer money. Also, they have been caught several times doing fact-checking by denying some fact, and when it was proved true (there is a video in Internet from Joan Planas where he requested to correct information), they did not correct the information giving excuses about the inability to do it (so they were aware of the "error").

That is the level of confidence I have in fact checking in Spain. In other countries, I do not know, but I see it as a fight for the monopoly of the truth and to control and censor with the excuse of better quality of information, which is not true here. Besides that, fact-checking should not be even a thing, because things are not so clear sometimes. In fact, I have seen some articles from those fact-checking agents with extreme bias loads with the only purpose of shifting people opinions.

Those were not facts, they were merely perspectives and why you should think what they say and why it is not correct according to them to use one term or another. All in all, propaganda.

So you're in favor of Facebook's policy on this? The article can still reach its intended audience (as you say, health professionals don't get their information from social media) and surely the BMJ will be more - not less - willing to publish controversial articles if they don't need to worry about them being used to mislead the public at large by being shared out of context.

My understanding is Pfizer was the "cool one" because it was a well established pharmaceutical company that created a vaccine on a compressed timeline that drastically cut the rate of severe illness and death, with performance better than much of its competition. i.e. it was to a great extent based on merit (both in the past and present).

> The vaccine has caused a significantly higher number of cardiac side effects than initial studies reported, which has just sort of been swept under the rug

Links with actual numbers to illustrate the scale of the alleged issue are pretty necessary with this kind of accusation.

> - It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way

One of the nordic countries has 10x more infections than the first wave and 0.5x people in intensive care. While the vaccines have failed to stop the pandemic, I disagree that the contribution is not meaningful.

I've read the article, Facebook's "fact checker" page, the BMJ's response, and the fact checker's response, as well as the posted response from Science Based Medicine. None of it "smacks of" anything, the series of events is clearly laid out.

A former Ventavia regional director provided internal company documents to Thacker that laid out potential flaws in clinical trials run by the company for Pfizer's vaccine candidate. Thacker's reporting on these documents places noticeable spin towards anti-vax sympathies for example:

> 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.

Even without Thacker's spin, this is concerning and deserves investigation. However, for the overall safety of the Pfizer vaccine it's not a significant factor. Ventavia ran 3 out of 153 clinical sites, and signed up about 1000 of 44000 subjects who participated in the trial. Even completely disregarding any data that came from Ventavia, there would be overwhelming evidence of the vaccine's efficacy and safety.

The obvious framing here should be that Ventavia is potentially an irresponsible steward of pharmaceutical trials and Pfizer needs to have greater level of oversight over such contractors. The framing Thacker went with is that the Pfizer vaccine's safety and efficacy are in question due to falsified trials. The latter is simply untrue, and reveals an agenda that is concerning from an editor at the BMJ.