Then there will be response articles which expose those errors as such, a consensus will be reached and we will move on to other issues. That is the nature of scientific discourse. Expecting everyone to shut up just because you shout "ANTIVAX" is not.
I posted exactly such a response. I don't expect everyone to shut up. The response addresses both the inaccuracies of the BMJ opinion piece and, more interestingly, explores how such a piece came to be put out by the BMJ in the first place.
That piece you linked is equally (if not more) biased as the original Thracker piece. Honestly, I've lost a lot of respect for SBM based on that post, as it's a political argument.
In general, it's incredibly sad that Covid has lead to such politicisation around vaccines and trials. It seems (to me, at least) that most of what people (SBM, the FB fact-checkers) are concerned about is other people using the information "incorrectly".
Like, fundamentally, this is an impossible problem to solve (none of us can control others interpretations of things) and the attempts to solve this "problem" are likely to result in much worse outcomes.
If you can view the full body of evidence and believe that there are "data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial" or support more specific accusations such as "the company... unblinded patients", then that's totally fair. I cannot find those conclusions in what's been released, and based on what's been released I think classifying such a headline as "missing context" is accurate.
If the headline was "Questions about data integrity in Ventavia-run vaccine trials" or "Allegations of misconduct at three vaccine trial sites" I might be more sympathetic; but as it stands I think classifying this as agenda-based spin is a fair assessment, as on the whole there are no concerns about about the Pfizer vaccine trial, only the three sites administered by Ventavia. The distinction being that the integrity of the Pfizer trial stands on solid ground even without the Ventavia data, which is a small fraction of the total data set.
That the agenda the BMJ is spinning for is anti-vax is deeply disturbing to me, but that's a separate discussion. I hope you can at least see the concern about such a headline, how it might be perceived as spin, even if you personally don't view it as such.
> on the whole there are no concerns about about the Pfizer vaccine trial, only the three sites administered by Ventavia
Like, the numbers for hospitalisation were very very small indeed, and while I (personally) don't believe that the entire trial was flawed (the extensive real world evidence would suggest otherwise), clinical trials are super important, and fixing flaws in them and reporting on them is exactly what I want the BMJ to do.
Additionally, the Lead Stories people are engaging in politics over this report, which kinda sickens me, to be honest. Both them and SBM are using ad-hominems to avoid engaging with the detail of this report, and that's concerning (particularly the fact checkers).
More generally, fact checking being done like this is very worrying (like the Cochrane collaboration got banned from IG for a while, which is nuts).
I guess my meta-point here is that standards of discourse are dropping everywhere, it's all explosions of rage in defence of a pre-determined outcome (which I mostly agree with, tbh) and this is very, very sad and bodes badly for humanity's ability to solve the problems in front of us over the next few decades.
We all know it this ideal of "just debunk it" doesn't work. Not just because a correction doesn't have the same reach, but because one audience will actively reject and ignore the evidence and then continue using the article on social media as "evidence" itself.
The audience for the BMJ is clearly listed as 'intended for health professionals'. I do think that these people would take seriously evidence for opposing views or experiments and draw their own - valid professional conclusions. These people are also unlikely to get their information from social media and take action on patient care because of it.
I am firmly against this lowest common denominator approach of people not being able to publish any 'hard science' anywhere through fear of it being taken out of context on social media - particularly after the push of recent years to do the exact opposite and make such stuff open access for all.
The BMJ is not the problem in the world of fake/outrage/out of context news online.
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.
Facebook can do what it likes - but it needs to be honest and say something like:
- We think the BMJ is too complicated for you to properly understand.
as opposed to
- We had some group independently check and the BMJ is objectively wrong.
The first one seems a little un-pc, so I would say that people sharing stuff online and a loud minority going off on some mad conspiracy is the [acceptable] cost of being open with science and research.
False binary. The BMJ article might not be wrong on pure facts, but it omits critical context. That is not the same as "too complicated to properly understand". Just because we have sort of supposed that medical professionals likely bring enough context on their own doesn't mean the publishing of that article is still not reckless.
I’m afraid I disagree. I haven’t ‘sort of supposed’ - I’ve fully expected medical professionals to bring their own context. It’s a medical journal, one of the most historical and leading ones in the world. There is nothing reckless in what they’ve done.
I want to say the opposite. The truth tends to win on the long run. On the other hand, allowing institutions to simply censor whatever it does not like by pressing a button never ended well.
