This article originally appeared onBrownstone Instituteand was republished with permission.
The serious-adverse-event signal found in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccine trials has been in the peer-reviewed literature for nearly four years. Mainstream media outlets, on the rare occasions they address it, have treated it not as evidence to be weighed but as misinformation to be managed — dismissed on the authority of experts without relevant expertise, or simply ignored. A recent BBC Radio 4 broadcast is a near-textbook example.
The broadcast aired onEverything Is Fake and Nobody Cares, a BBC Radio 4 series hosted by Jamie Bartlett, whose stated purpose is to ask why, in so much of modern life, fakery is no longer punished but rewarded. It is a reasonable question. The most direct answer the series has produced to date appears inside one of its own episodes.
In the episode in question, Bartlett devoted his broadcast to Dr. Aseem Malhotra and Covid-19 vaccine safety. As part of that segment, he aired a specific claim about a peer-reviewed paper I led, published in the journalVaccinein September 2022. To evaluate Dr. Malhotra’s on-air statements, Bartlett brought in Dr. Vicky Male, a reproductive immunologist at Imperial College London. Dr. Male told listeners that the authors of the paper had been “specifically told to make it clear this paper should not be used” to support the kinds of claims Dr. Malhotra was making.
That statement is not true. No one told us that. The paper does not contain such an instruction. I am one of its authors; I have the peer review correspondence; I know what the journal asked of us and what it did not. Anyone could have checked this in five minutes by reading the paper, which runs eight pages and is open-access online. Jamie Bartlett did not check.
On the basis of an unchecked false claim about a scientific paper, Bartlett told his audience that Dr. Malhotra was spreading false information — on a podcast whose central premise is that modern life now rewards exactly this kind of thing.
Whether that reflected willful dishonesty or plain incompetence, I cannot say. The case that follows lays out what happened in enough detail for readers to decide for themselves. Both possibilities reflect poorly on a national broadcaster. Only one of them would be excusable.
The most consequential of Dr. Male’s on-air claims was the one I opened with: that the authors were “specifically told to make it clear this paper should not be used to make the kinds of claims Dr. Malhotra is making,” and that Dr. Malhotra’s statement “is not actually correct. The paper doesn’t show that that’s true.”
Told by whom? Dr. Male did not say. Scientific papers pass through three groups of people who could, in principle, issue such an instruction: peer-reviewers, journal editors, and — in some fields — regulators or sponsoring agencies. None of them told us any such thing. The peer review correspondence for our paper is not private. We deposited it publicly alongside our adjudication records and study data at a Zenodo archive, and the paper’s data-availability statement directs readers there (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6564402). Anyone can read the reviewers’ comments. They contain substantive methodological questions and no such instruction. The editors communicated no such instruction before, during, or after review. There were no sponsoring agencies, because the paper was carried out with no grant funding at all. There was, in short, no one who told us any such thing, because no such exchange took place.
What does the paper actually say?
Source: The Vigilant Fox
