GRIFT ON, FACT-CHECKERS, YOUR CREDIBILITY IS SHOT
British Medical Journal vaccine-whistleblower investigation exposes them.
Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial - BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL - Nov 2, 2021
Sometimes we get a win. Science journalism isn’t completely dead. I learned this week from Paul Thacker that he is up for a major prize honouring an expose he wrote with Pfizer vaccine whistleblower, Brook Jackson for the British Medical Journal. He’ll be appearing on my TNT internet radio show - On The Fringe today at 1PM EST.
You can hear them both on this episode of Trish Wood is Critical. We were one of the the to first to interview Jackson and Thacker. Legacy media ignores the story and despite mountains of receipts — documents and audio recordings — they were fact-checked; an enterprise now synonymous with narrative gatekeeping, mostly about science and Covid.
Thacker was called a crank and lumped in with the dreaded cult of anti-vaxxers, which I guess includes the editorial board of the venerable BMJ. The headline below is from a fact-checking website called Science Based Medicine.
What the heck happened to The BMJ?
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 anti-vaxxers, 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?
David Gorski on November 8, 2021
Nature Magazine’s Amy Maxmen said Thacker was fuelling the anti-vaxx movement, quoting high-school-level science writing (perfectly possible) from Lead Stories, a known narrative stitcher.
Another Covid fact-checker, labelled the BMJ story a typical conspiracy theory.
It is shocking how absolutely certain the narrative stitchers always seem to be.
The BMJ piece is meticulously sourced and recently a judge has ruled the whistleblower’s lawsuit can proceed. And now the story is being nominated for a prestigious journalism award.
Most of the science fact-checkers snarked at the Great Barrington Declaration, quibbled with natural immunity, believed in lockdowns and have declared the Wuhan lab leak story a conspiracy theory. When confronted with facts that contradict the approved narrative, citing missing context is the fact-checkers go-to move.
So wrong, for so long. It’s scary, actually.
And for the record, here is an Intercept report exposing Pfizer’s pushback against whistleblowers like Brook Jackson. In it, we are reminded the company paid 2.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties for dishonest marketing of its products. How’s that for missing context?