Fact-Checking is so Yesterday! Rumor-Control, that's what's Hot!
Or how the FDA is going to circumvent a United States District Judges decision
The last three years have seen a good amount of public debate and censorship around certain topics and the accuracy of statements made by governments, their agencies, scientists, established media, social media or independent/new media. I am talking of course about the Pandemic, it’s origins, lethality of the virus and the subsequent measures taken to prevent the spread, injury and loss of life.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the idea of “conspiracy theories“ and the plight/duty of governments and media to counter these has been growing. Whether it was elements of the public casting doubt on “official narratives”, scientific analyses by governmental agencies, handling of scientific papers by scientific publications and their editors or the reporting by established media, there was seemingly something lacking from the public debate.
The first fact-checker that I became aware of was snopes.com. According to Wikipedia, this page was launched 29 years ago, in 1994 as “Urban Legends Reference page“ by Barbara Mikkelson and David P. Mikkelson. In the 21st century however the (post-hoc)fact-checking idea exploded. Anyone and everyone was either opening a completely new fact-checking business, or created internal fact-checking division. Reuters, dpa, dw, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, correctiv.org, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org to just name a few examples.
If you want to learn more about Fact-Checking I recommend this article published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias Communication.
Fact-Checking, of course, is all about facts, about hard data/evidence. Checking the data, verifying or falsifying it does get pretty hard however, when you do not have access to the facts/data. That is why in many countries, if not all, there are laws that allow members of the public to request access to data, which is held by government agencies and is not readily publicly available. In the US these requests are handled by the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA).
Since the start of the Pandemic, late 2019 early 2020, there have been efforts to create vaccines to protect from SARS-CoV2. In the strife for the timely development of vaccines against COVID-19, the existing protocols for testing new vaccines had been modified. There were voices that cautioned against these changes, raising concerns that the safety, under shortened timelines, could not be accurately determined for those new vaccines. Especially since there were also technologies being used, which never before had successfully passed all necessary test stages, to bring a new vaccine to “market“.
Enter the “Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency“ not-for-profit organization. After the FDA had approved Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, marketed as “Comirnaty“, on August 23rd, 2021, PHMPT requested access through FOIA to the documents Pfizer had provided to the FDA during the approval process and afterwards, to ensure safety and efficacy of the vaccine, along with a request for expedited processing “given the time sensitive nature of the issue“ . On September 9th, 2021, the FDA rejected that request with the following reasoning:
PHMPT did “not demonstrate[] a compelling need that involves an imminent threat to the life or physical safety of an individual” or “that there exists an urgency to inform the public concerning actual or alleged Federal Government activity.”
United States District Judge Mark T. Pittman ordered the FDA, on January 6th, 2022, to produce the documents that the "PUBLIC HEALTH AND MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS FOR TRANSPARENCY" sought in connection with the EUA granted to Pfizer for their new COVID vaccine. This means that the public can now, instead of in 75 years, read the documents that Pfizer handed over to the FDA at the end of 2020, early 2021. Among those documents is a study on the bio-distribution of the LNPs, the carriers for the modified mRNA. In this study it is shown in table 1 on pages 23-24 that 15 minutes after IM injection the LNPs are detectable in you blood/plasma, every organ and every tissue in your body.
There is also a post marketing report, which has some interesting information. For instance that women were three times more likely to suffer side effects than men.
And these are just two of, as of me writing this, 1,118 documents produced by the FDA and publicly available on the webpage of the “Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency“. Let me stress this, because it is important.
These documents are not held on the official web presence of the FDA, fda.gov. You cannot find those documents there.
Why, you may very well ask now, is this of any importance? Let me ask you, how do you know something is real? If you are unable yourself to verify a document found on the internet, what do you do? This is where the concept of trust comes in. But trust is only a “Band-Aid” in absence of direct access to facts. And this is where the fun starts. Take a look at the following initiative by the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/rumor-control
Here they create a situation, where if it is not on the official FDA webpage, you should be very careful to take any information as factual. As I have mentioned before, the documents which the FDA had to make publicly available (“produce“), are not hosted on the official FDA.gov web presence. Instead you can find all of those documents on the following webpage: phmpt.org.
Well that settles it then, does it not? Hang on a second… let me just quickly look up if I can find anything about the PHMPT.org webpage… a yes…
And if you have never heard of the law suit, nor have read the judges decision, would you be confident in saying that that webpage is not spreading misinformation, or rumors?
If this idiotic “Analysis“ was not enough, I got proof, that reality is really Stranger Than Fiction:
Sometimes things are really just too ridiculous to be true… and yet… also, I am waiting for someone to fact-check me on this.
Anyways, this here means that the FDA has found a loophole for the order: Yes, they have to “produce” (make publicly available) those documents and show to the public that they knew of the risks (for instance women are three times more likely to suffer from side effects according to a Pfizer document from end of April 2021) and lied about them, but they now run a campaign that will make sure that as long as they do not have to put them up on their own website, people will ignore it.
In essence, if you cannot Misinform, Misdirect.
I wonder what the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency think about this. And of course really interesting would be to find out what that judge would say about this.