Although I was hoping we were nearing the end of social media censorship, today on Facebook, attempts to post this YouTube video regarding adverse reaction rates associated with Covid-19 vaccine batches will be met with the following message: Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways. The posting will be appended with this fact check, which states that:
Campbell’s implied claim uses a very large number of post-vaccine adverse events as evidence that something is wrong with the vaccine.
This misleading tack has been employednumeroustimes in false claims about vaccine safety. It ignores the fact that if one monitors a very large population, there will be a baseline rate of illnesses and deaths that occur, even if this population is unvaccinated.
According to the research letter referenced in the video, some batches appear to have resulted in a 1 in 20 rate of adverse events. Given those numbers, the fact check reads to me as something akin to “a bomb was dropped on our city, but we can’t necessarily attribute excess injuries and deaths to it because injuries and deaths happen every day.” Regardless, I don’t find any indication from the fact check that the institutions the public relies on to protect their health are going to research these safety signals any time soon.
In this environment, is it any wonder that the public relies on figures such as John Campbell to investigate these matters? Our public institutions have no-one but themselves to blame.
When searching for the research letter on Google, the first thing that pops up in the search results is the fact check. The letter itself was much more difficult to find. It seems like there is an ideal opportunity here for libraries to advertise themselves as the places to go for people who want to “do their own research,” as they could point people to primary sources. Given that this sort of advertising could be tricky for a government entity, perhaps the real opportunities lie in librarians starting their own freelance research businesses.
Top image: Classic pose with a magnifying glass - model Gwyneth Ellis.jpg/ Wikimedia Commons
I just entered the title of the paper into the presearch search engine and it came up as the second hit - unadorned by any caveats or warnings. The first hit was a general explanation of what COVID-19 is.
What you ran into was one of the main reasons I stopped using Google.
Thanks for looking! I didn't have the title of the paper when I was searching and couldn't find it under keywords. Looking at the "fact check" again though, I now see that they linked to it in the body of the fact check, under the "review" section. If I type the title of the paper into Google, it does come up, so I stand corrected there, at least as far as a title search.
Some combinations of "Danish researchers" and "side effects" and "vaccine batches" and "letter" and maybe "Pfizer." I tried several searches on Google and Brave. I can't remember now how I finally found the study, actually, but I eventually found it on Brave through some circuitous route. I also found the Epoch Times article about it, but it was behind a paywall so I couldn't access it.
So I entered the search "danish researchers side effects vaccine batches letter pfizer" (without quotes) and it finds it again. The #1 return was a Bloomberg article about it. The second return was Politifact, but nothing stands out about it - it's just another entry. #3,4, and 5 are medical site articles about the paper that look neutral from the few sentences they show. And #6 is the paper itself via Wiley. It also shows up at #10 via Wiley. Interesting. slightly different link. Looks like one has had a change in authorship or something.
The Facebook response is chilling. Glad I never invested in social media on FB. My wife currently has a love-hate relationship with it and keeps threatening to cancel her account. They've "suspended" her several times for truly innocuous activity, and are doing the slow-shuffle thing on one of her groups which she keeps entirely apolitical. She has no idea why they are doing this, but they are.
Was that on presearch? BTW I first heard about presearch in connection with this event--https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/take-back-our-tech-upcoming-talks/comments-- but I still haven't tried it yet!
Just go to presearch.com in your browser. It has a search field just like Google. Works just like Google. It's not hard to make it your default search engine in a browser, but you don't need to do that to search with it.
I really like this idea and I wonder if enough librarians and other researchers would contribute to this project? I admit I am not very sure about how to research various assertions that seem questionable. I hope that folks with this expertise will pursue it, otherwise we will live in a world where truth is 6 degrees of separation away.
I agree! Librarians have the expertise to find data but additional expertises often needed to decipher it. Here's a website with the numbers Ed Dowd's private company has compiled regarding excess death and disability statistics--https://phinancetechnologies.com/HumanityProjects/Projects.htm#Nav_Disabilities-- and here is an earlier fact check regarding Dowd--https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-excess-mortality/fact-check-no-evidence-that-people-aged-25-44-experienced-an-84-increase-in-excess-mortality-due-to-covid-vaccine-rollout-idUSL2N2VS1BI. Dowd has invited medical researchers to look at his data to determine the causes of these increases in death and disability. Maybe this will gain some traction.
I just entered the title of the paper into the presearch search engine and it came up as the second hit - unadorned by any caveats or warnings. The first hit was a general explanation of what COVID-19 is.
What you ran into was one of the main reasons I stopped using Google.
Thanks for looking! I didn't have the title of the paper when I was searching and couldn't find it under keywords. Looking at the "fact check" again though, I now see that they linked to it in the body of the fact check, under the "review" section. If I type the title of the paper into Google, it does come up, so I stand corrected there, at least as far as a title search.
Do you remember what search phrase you used? I'm interested in trying it to see how well it does with the same input.
Some combinations of "Danish researchers" and "side effects" and "vaccine batches" and "letter" and maybe "Pfizer." I tried several searches on Google and Brave. I can't remember now how I finally found the study, actually, but I eventually found it on Brave through some circuitous route. I also found the Epoch Times article about it, but it was behind a paywall so I couldn't access it.
So I entered the search "danish researchers side effects vaccine batches letter pfizer" (without quotes) and it finds it again. The #1 return was a Bloomberg article about it. The second return was Politifact, but nothing stands out about it - it's just another entry. #3,4, and 5 are medical site articles about the paper that look neutral from the few sentences they show. And #6 is the paper itself via Wiley. It also shows up at #10 via Wiley. Interesting. slightly different link. Looks like one has had a change in authorship or something.
The Facebook response is chilling. Glad I never invested in social media on FB. My wife currently has a love-hate relationship with it and keeps threatening to cancel her account. They've "suspended" her several times for truly innocuous activity, and are doing the slow-shuffle thing on one of her groups which she keeps entirely apolitical. She has no idea why they are doing this, but they are.
Was that on presearch? BTW I first heard about presearch in connection with this event--https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/take-back-our-tech-upcoming-talks/comments-- but I still haven't tried it yet!
Just go to presearch.com in your browser. It has a search field just like Google. Works just like Google. It's not hard to make it your default search engine in a browser, but you don't need to do that to search with it.
Somehow I have avoided suspension on Facebook.
I really like this idea and I wonder if enough librarians and other researchers would contribute to this project? I admit I am not very sure about how to research various assertions that seem questionable. I hope that folks with this expertise will pursue it, otherwise we will live in a world where truth is 6 degrees of separation away.
I agree! Librarians have the expertise to find data but additional expertises often needed to decipher it. Here's a website with the numbers Ed Dowd's private company has compiled regarding excess death and disability statistics--https://phinancetechnologies.com/HumanityProjects/Projects.htm#Nav_Disabilities-- and here is an earlier fact check regarding Dowd--https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-excess-mortality/fact-check-no-evidence-that-people-aged-25-44-experienced-an-84-increase-in-excess-mortality-due-to-covid-vaccine-rollout-idUSL2N2VS1BI. Dowd has invited medical researchers to look at his data to determine the causes of these increases in death and disability. Maybe this will gain some traction.
"The Conspiratorial Mind: A Meta-Analytic Review of Motivational and Personological Correlates"
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/06/why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories
"Doing your own research and other impossible acts of epistemic superheroism"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09515089.2022.2138019
"Playing the Expert: ‘Doing Your Own Research’ as Epistemic Cosplay"
https://aep.unc.edu/2023/06/07/playing-the-expert-doing-your-own-research-as-epistemic-cosplay/
"What type of deference to science do we owe each other?"
https://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/openfordebate/what-type-of-deference-to-science-do-we-owe-each-other/