{"id":204860,"date":"2022-02-14T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2022-02-14T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=204860"},"modified":"2022-02-09T04:29:38","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T04:29:38","slug":"the-british-medical-journal-story-that-exposed-politicized-fact-checking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/02\/the-british-medical-journal-story-that-exposed-politicized-fact-checking\/","title":{"rendered":"The British Medical Journal Story That Exposed Politicized “Fact-Checking”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The fact-checkers who flagged Paul Thacker’s British Medical Journal article about a Pfizer subcontractor for Facebook admitted they police narrative, not fact.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

1 Feb 2022 – <\/em>In February of 2010, the New York Times <\/em>released a front page story entitled, \u201cResearch Ties Diabetes Drug to Heart Woes<\/a>.\u201d The lede read:<\/p>\n

Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Times <\/em>piece quoted an internal F.D.A. report that said the GlaxoSmithKline diabetes drug Avandia, also known as Rosiglitazone, was \u201clinked\u201d to 304 deaths in 2009, adding the conclusion of the two doctors who authored the report: \u201cRosiglitazone should be removed from the market.\u201d The story was released in advance of a Senate Finance Committee study<\/a> that produced a series of damning internal documents, including one in which an FDA safety officer expressed concern that Avandia presented such serious cardiovascular risks that \u201cthe safety of the study itself cannot be assured, and is not acceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Paul Thacker<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the chief investigators on that study was Paul Thacker, at the time a committee aide under Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley. Multi-year document hauls like the Avandia report were Thacker\u2019s stock in trade. I first met him around then because his committee frequently dealt with financial crisis issues I covered. Thacker, who went on to contribute to a number of commercial and academic journals, was trained in a tradition of bipartisan committee reporting that relies heavily on documents and on-the-record testimony, i.e. the indisputable stuff both sides are comfortable backing.<\/p>\n

Thacker has an in-your-face style and a dark sense of humor, and talking to him can feel like being lost in a Bill Hicks routine, but his information is good. In his years in the Senate, his job was publicizing damaging information about the world\u2019s most litigious companies. Certain Washington jobs require a healthy fear of the $1000-an-hour lawyers that every Fortune 500<\/em> company has on speed dial, and Thacker has always retained the Beltway investigator\u2019s usefully paranoid approach to publishing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know how to do these things,\u201d he says. \u201cI know how to work with whistleblowers.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was more than a little surprising, then, when Thacker\u2019s name appeared in the middle of a bizarre international fact-checking controversy. In an article<\/a> for one of the world\u2019s oldest academic outlets, the British Medical Journal, <\/em>Thacker wrote a piece entitled, \u201cCovid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer\u2019s vaccine trial.\u201d He did what he\u2019d done countless times, shepherding into print the tale of an apparent whistleblower with an unsettling story. Brook Jackson worked for a Texas firm called Ventavia that conducted a portion of the research trials for Pfizer\u2019s Covid-19 vaccine. This is the same vaccine that Thacker himself, who now lives in Spain and is married to a physician, had taken.<\/p>\n

After going through both legal and peer review, but without contacting Ventavia \u2014 apparently, they feared an injunction \u2014 the BMJ <\/em>published Thacker\u2019s piece on November 2nd, 2021. The money passage read:<\/p>\n

A regional director who was employed at the research organization Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer\u2019s pivotal phase III trial.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Beginning on November 10th, 2021, the editors began receiving complaints from readers, who said they were having difficulty sharing it. As editors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbassi later wrote in an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about \u201cMissing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.\u201d Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share \u201cfalse information\u201d might have their posts moved lower in Facebook\u2019s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were \u201cpartly false.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Facebook has yet to respond to queries about this piece. Meanwhile, the site that conducted Facebook\u2019s \u201cfact check,\u201d Lead Stories<\/em>, ran a piece<\/a> dated November 10th whose URL used the term \u201choax alert\u201d (Lead Stories <\/em>denies they called the BMJ <\/em>piece a hoax). Moreover, they deployed a rhetorical device that such \u201cchecking\u201d sites now use with regularity, repeatedly correcting assertions Thacker and the British Medical Journal <\/em>never made. This began with the title: \u201cThe British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The British Medical Journal <\/em>never said Jackson\u2019s story revealed \u201cdisqualifying flaws\u201d in the vaccine. Nor did it claim the negative information \u201ccalls into question the results of the Pfizer clinical trial.\u201d It also didn\u2019t claim that the story is \u201cserious enough to discredit data from the clinical trials.\u201d The BMJ\u2019s <\/em>actual language<\/a> said Jackson\u2019s story could \u201craise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight,\u201d which is true.<\/p>\n

The real issue with Thacker\u2019s piece is that it went viral and was retweeted by the wrong people. As Lead Stories<\/em> noted with marked disapproval, some of those sharers included the likes of Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy. To them, this clearly showed that the article was bad somehow, but the problem was, there was nothing to say the story was untrue.<\/p>\n

In a remarkable correspondence with BMJ <\/em>editors, Lead Stories <\/em>editor Alan Duke explained that the term \u201cmissing context\u201d was invented by Facebook:<\/p>\n

To deal with content that could mislead without additional context but which was otherwise true or real\u2026 Sometimes Facebook\u2019s messaging about the fact checking labels can sound overly aggressive and scary. If you have an issue with their messaging you should indeed take it up with them as we are unable to change any of it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cMissing context\u201d has become a term to disparage reporting that is true but inconvenient. As Thacker notes in the Q&A below, \u201cThey\u2019re checking narrative, not fact.\u201d<\/p>\n

The significance of the British Medical Journal <\/em>story is that it showed how easily reporting that is true can be made to look untrue or conspiratorial. The growing bureaucracy of \u201cfact-checking\u201d sites that help platforms like Facebook decide what to flag is now taking into account issues like: the political beliefs of your sources, the presence of people of ill repute among your readers, and the tendency of audiences to draw unwanted inferences from the reported facts. All of this can now become part of how authorities do or do not define reporting as factual.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut that\u2019s not a fact check,\u201d says Thacker. \u201cYou just don\u2019t like the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

The BMJ <\/em>story is about a woman, Jackson, who was fired shortly after complaining of sloppy practices to the F.D.A. and also to Pfizer. Ventavia claims her firing was unconnected to her official complaint \u2014 \u201cVentavia was not aware of a complaint made to the FDA until\u00a0we saw it on Twitter in early November of 2021,\u201d they told me. They also contest other aspects of her story:<\/p>\n

These same accusations were made a year ago, at which time\u00a0Ventavia\u00a0notified the appropriate parties. The allegations were investigated and determined to be unsubstantiated.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I asked Ventavia who these \u201cappropriate parties\u201d were, and who conducted the investigation. At this, they brought in an outside PR consultant who asked for more time to answer, but ultimately decided not to answer further.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not easy to see how the firm can claim the allegations were \u201cunsubstantiated,\u201d since Jackson supplied the BMJ <\/em>with documents, photos, and recordings. Also, a number of the article\u2019s claims were backed up, directly or indirectly, by other former employees. One, admittedly unnamed, told Thacker about the Pfizer trial, \u201cI don\u2019t think it was good clean data\u2026 It\u2019s a crazy mess.\u201d<\/p>\n

The British Medical Journal <\/em>didn\u2019t publish all of the potentially damaging information. In one recorded meeting, to which I was allowed to listen, a senior Ventavia executive tells Jackson he knows the trial situation is a \u201ccleanup on aisle five. And we know that it\u2019s significant.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that same meeting, in which Jackson seems to be quizzed by two of the company\u2019s top executives about whether or not she might have shared her concerns outside the company (\u201cWhat have you done?\u201d she\u2019s asked), there\u2019s another bizarre exchange.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven\u2019t even finished quantifying the number of errors, and categorizing the types of errors that we\u2019re seeing. In my mind, it looks like it\u2019s something new every day,\u201d one of the executives says to her.<\/p>\n

Obviously, Jackson\u2019s story by itself doesn\u2019t suggest the Pfizer vaccine didn\u2019t work, or contain proof of damaging side effects. However, her story does suggest that the subcontractors hired by Pfizer to conduct its trials were and are, at best, incautious. In one meeting, an executive talks about seeing \u201cexposed, used needles thrown into biohazard bags\u201d instead of sharps containers as required. There is also information about breaking protocol on blinding, failing to follow up properly with subjects experiencing adverse reactions, mislabeling specimens, and other problems.<\/p>\n

Whether about maintenance issues at American Airlines<\/a> or a bank employee\u2019s reports about the pooling and marketing of defective mortgages<\/a>, such \u201cbad practices\u201d reporting has long been a staple of investigative journalism. Previously, the idea of spiking or flagging such reports on the grounds that they might have convinced some people not to fly or use banks would have been laughable. Having done many of these<\/a> stories<\/a> myself, I\u2019m familiar with demands for \u201cmissing context,\u201d but always from a corporate defense lawyer or a political spokesperson. That it\u2019s coming from media gatekeepers now is crazy.<\/p>\n

Lead Stories <\/em>eventually wrote a second piece entitled<\/a>, \u201cWhy Lead Stories Fact Checked the BMJ,\u201d which complained that a variety of sites ranging from the Conservative Beaver <\/em>to Natural News <\/em>to The Free Thought Project <\/em>had written fake or misleading stories based upon the BMJ <\/em>piece. This second article also complained Robert F. Kennedy\u2019s site, The Defender<\/em>, republished the piece.<\/p>\n

Worse, they wrote, Kennedy had republished three other Thacker stories, with titles like \u201cNew WHO Group to Look Into Pandemic Origins Dogged by Alleged Conflicts of Interest<\/a>\u201d and \u201cThe covid-19 lab leak hypothesis: did the media fall victim to a misinformation campaign<\/a>?\u201d This is how Lead Stories<\/em> phrased their complaint:<\/p>\n

This was not the first BMJ piece from Thacker copied by the Defender this way. The site has an entire author profile page for him with the oldest article listed dating back to July 2021.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Were there factual issues with any of those other pieces? If so, Lead Stories <\/em>didn\u2019t indicate any. The mere fact that Robert F. Kennedy liked previous Thacker stories was the apparent issue. Lead Stories <\/em>also took issue with the fact that Thacker thanked Dr. Robert Malone on Twitter for highlighting the BMJ <\/em>response to their fact check. You can\u2019t see the whole exchange, because of course Twitter has since zapped Malone\u2019s account:<\/p>\n

\n

I am the reporter who wrote that investigation for The BMJ about the whistleblower on Pfizer's clinical trial. <\/p>\n

That fact check was nonsense and incompetent.<\/p>\n

Thank you for sending this around.<\/p>\n

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) December 25, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n