Who fact checks the fact checkers

well you're most welcome to this video Monday the 10th of October now probably literally thousands of people have been writing in saying who do we trust how do we know what the evidence is and that's what we're going to be talking about in this video because I'm very concerned about this as well it's never been as eroded as this in my long career as far as I can remember now in healthcare we assess the patient's need we plan what we're going to do about it we carry out some sort of intervention and then we evaluate the effectiveness of that intervention and if necessary go into another cycle but we can only intervene if we have a rationale for that intervention we have to be able to say why we're intervening and the rationale really has to be based on some sort of uh Natural Science some physiological or pathophysiological process so it's got to be based on an empirical observation preferably some research data findings and this is consistent with it with the founding father of evidence-based medicine David Sackett who said you need three components some empirical evidence that it works we need if there's no empirical evidence we can use expert opinion consensus expert opinion and it's got to be consistent with patient preferences now the first thing I want to talk about here um is is the institute for scientific Freedom now that this is from them all science should strive to be free from Financial conflicts of interest Financial conflicts of interest now um I'm not going to conduct an official um YouTube poll on this but you know if you think there's currently Financial conflicts of interest going on in in the way that Healthcare data is interpreted to put your hand up now some of you think that all science should be published as soon as possible and made freely accessible of course this should be open for public discourse all scientific data including study protocols should be freely accessible allowing others to do their own analysis or science and scientific methods need to be open to International peer review and the question is is this always happening so I just want to take one example today really this is this is again from The Institute of scientific freedom and it's based on this open letter that's published in the the British medical journal now this was uh late last year 17th of December 2021 we did look at it at the time but it fits in this context again today of the concerns that many of us currently have so open letter from the bmj to Facebook about censoring serious data Integrity issues with Pfizer covid-19 vaccine now this is what happens to be about but this is basically about uh this concern about censorship now this is from Fiona Godley uh who was then editor-in-chief and then uh Carmen Abbasi is now the editor in chew for the bmj and I'm just delighted to see the that they take responsibility and accountability for this um we are responsible for everything that bmj contains so so they are saying uh this is our domain we'll answer questions about this we're accountable for this I wish everyone would do that very refreshing so this is the left area dear Mark Zuckerberg the bmj one of the world's oldest and most influential influential medical journals now there's a good uh review of the history of the bmj here some fascinating old articles and the first one was published on the 3rd of October 1840 not 1940 1840 so um I think we could say that the British medical journal is there is well established uh anyway going back to the letter serious concerns about the fact checking you know we have these people who've put themselves up as fact Checkers you know would you like to call yourself a fact Checker please do you know you can put whatever your name is then in Brackets fact Checker after it um it seems anyone these days can call themselves a fact checker or the debunker it's uh the these These are thrown around rather lightly and being undertaken by third party providers on terms of uh Facebook matter this is the bmj letter now this example in September a former employee of ventavia a contact uh a contract research company helping him carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial began providing the bmj with dozens of uh internal documents photos videos Etc now this was the article on that we did cover at the time as well because there's some interesting data came out of that at the time anyway carrying on with the letter now these materials are really revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices incurring at ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety so this is serious because in the bmj's opinion it could impact patient safety we also discovered that despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago the FDA did not inspect fentavious sites why did the FDA not to inspect ventavious sites is another interesting question don't know quite what the FDA does but I would have thought that'd be one of the things they did if I'm wrong the FDA can uh Food and Drug Administration can contact me the bmj commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story in our journal the article was published on the 2nd November which we've looked at following full review by the bmjs or authorities legal and peer review uh covid-19 verse each trip so this was the article here covid-19 researcher Blows the Whistle on data Integrity issues in Pfizer's vaccine trial which is the example we are using um uh but from November the 10th readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article strangely enough some reports have been unable to share it many others reported having their post flagged with a warning about missing context independent fact Checkers is these fact Checkers again say this information could mislead people so these fact Checkers say but as we say who fact checks the fact that checkers and what's a fact Checker anyway anyway um those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share false information might have their post-removed move lower in the Facebook news feed um group administrators were the uh where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were partly false again remember this is people sharing the article from the British medical journal readers were directed to fact checked performed by Facebook contractor named lead stories according to the British medical article journal and this is one of their pieces here and we'll look at some look at some critique of this in a minute so fact Checker the British medical journal did not reveal disqualifying and ignored reports of flaws in Pfizer covid-19 vacca trial vaccine trial now to me that's not quite English so would concern me if the title wasn't quite in English given that that is supposed to be the language medium that this is in um the grammar is difficult to understand shall we say so not a auspicious start anyway we find that uh the fact check performed by lead stories to be inaccurate incomplete and irresponsible according to the British medical journal pretty strong words pretty strong words inaccurate incompetent and irresponsible they go on British medical journal letter goes on remember this is their letter to Mark Zuckerberg it fails to provide any uh assertions of of facts that the bmj article got wrong so it's not actually set so the bmj is saying it doesn't actually say what they got wrong it has a nonsensical title as we've just looked at a bit strange really why why did they not get that in proper grammar uh the first paragraph inaccurately labels the bmj as a news blog okay one of the world's if not the world's oldest medical journal is now a news blog apparently um it contains a screen excuse me it contains a screenshot of our article with a stamp over it uh stating um floor is reviewed despite the leads stories article not identifying anything false or untrue in the bmj article it published a story on its website and URL that contains the phrase hoax alert so they're really saying I don't think they'd be saying that surely they're not saying this that the bmj deliberately perpetrated a hoax uh We've contacted the bmj have contacted lead stories on Facebook of course um but they uh that they don't want to change their article so um about their article actions uh so that's the complaint there um we've also contacted Facebook directly requesting immediate removal of the fact checking label and any link to the lead story article there by Lang I read us to freely share the article on your platform talking about Facebook there's also a wider concern uh that we wish to raise we're aware that the British medical journal is not the only high quality information provider that's been affected by incompetence by the incompetence of meta's fact-checking regime according to the bmj to give another example we would highlight the treatment by Instagram also owned by meta of Cochran the international provider of high quality systematic reviews of medical evidence and that was seems to be based on this Twitter discussion here but Cochrane of course is a well-known uh medical evidence database um the letter goes on rather than investigating rather than in it rather than investing a proportion a better substantial profits to help ensure the accuracy of medical information shared through media posts you have apparently delegated responsible to people incompetent in carrying out this crucial task pretty strong words bmj saying they were incompetent to carry out this crucial task fact checking has been a staple of good journals for decades what has happened in this instance should be a concern to anyone who values and relies on sources such as the British medical journal then we hope that you will act swiftly too Rectify this so there you go um getting back to what they say on The Institute for scientific Freedom or sight should strive to be free from Financial conflicts of interest or sites should be published as soon as possible and made freely available or scientific data including study protocols should be a fail freely available allowing others to do their own analysis and this requires peer review that means articles the written by for example researchers medical researchers should be reviewed by their peers that's someone who is also a medical researcher who's competent to do that work someone of equal stature experience and qualifications another scientist um whereas in some instances journalists for example have set them up as self-supers peer reviewers so that there we are it's this is just part of the concern that we have that we're not getting the full evidence so obviously as we've said on many times on this channel we need to follow the evidence wherever it leads so the evidence changes and we go with it that's all we've got in scientific Healthcare to follow the evidence and if we're not getting the evidence and the evidence as being juggled around as a commercial um profit making commodity as expressed in in this institute for scientific reading um it should be free from Financial conflicts of interest then the erosion of the trust in science and medical research is a massive problem and could in itself cause many many many uh potential so much harm pain suffering and death if people don't trust good quality medical data and that is now in my view a problem so I will always try and give you the best understanding that I have but of course I don't have full understanding so you have to get other other medical sources to get information from but that's currently the problem uh because we live in a fairly dictatorial age unfortunately now on a slightly lighter note a Nobel Prize for medicine and Physiology is awarded every year Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and this year it's awarded to savante uh Pablo who I have actually been following myself to some extent because the field I'm particularly interested interested in if there's discoverers concerning the Genome of extinct hominids and human evolution so this is the guy that uh sequenced the Neanderthal genome uh this uh now extinct apart from the genes that are in US species of hominids they also discovered uh denisova so so what we have in um obviously we've got us modern homo sapiens but then there was other um there was other um Homo Sapien neanderthalis uh in in Europe and um and moved over into Asia and we interbred with them at an early stage so I haven't had mine tested but I'm probably about one to two percent to Neanderthal genes in me as indeed in you if you were as long as you don't live in sub-Saharan Africa um where there's nothing to breeding with the undertows but everywhere else Japan China um Aborigines in Australia any way you want to think of that isn't sub-Saharan Africa we have got some Neanderthal genes in US and he also discovered denisovo which is another group of ancient hominids uh there was this cave where a monk called Dennis used to live in so it was called Dennis's cave so the the denisovans that's where they got the name from uh but but that they also interbred with early humans and migrated East towards Oceano and Australia fascinating story we're not going to go into it don't know it all anyway uh Gene transfers are both into modern humans absolutely fascinating this ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today so the genetic makeup can affect our physiology today for example affecting how our immune systems react to infections and that is not my words that's from the Nobel Prize website so uh fascinating there interesting of course the note that the Nobel Prize for medicine this year has nothing to do with the pandemic it's about uh evolutionary and early hominogenetics and indeed modern genetics so well-deserved Nobel Prize congratulations to uh uh cervante Pablo Swedish geneticist a man who prizes evidence very highly I'm going to leave it there um you'll have your own thoughts as indeed do I thank you for watching

Channel: Dr. John Campbell

Views: 430,207

Keywords: physiology, nursing, NCLEX, health, disease, biology, medicine, nurse education, medical education, pathophysiology, campbell, human biology, human body

Id: YuqDu9ZCP_c

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/hiptobeysquare]

You know, I'm something of a fact checker myself.

[u/NancyPelosiAteMyDog]

It's pretty wild that gender studies graduates who wouldn't be hired to clean toilets at McDonald's suddenly have the power to censor everyone in the name of their sponsors a preferred political parties.

[u/CrackerJurk]

Only imbeciles use and reference fact checkers. Oops, did I write that out loud?

[u/xQuinchien]

fackshually