Free Republic

The medical misinformation problem isn’t going away, with around three-quarters of physicians saying inaccurate medical information has made it harder to treat patients and has impacted patient outcomes, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted on behalf of the de Beaumont Foundation.This comes after nearly three years of a global pandemic that put healthcare in the crosshairs of medical misinformation. Indeed, medical misinformation existed before COVID-19, but the politicization of the pandemic made the issue ripe for inaccurate and misleading medical information. The more than 800 physicians included in the survey indicated that politicization and misleading medical claims have had...

Members of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) advisory committee on combating “misinformation” privately cast critics of their work, including those who raised the alarm over government censorship of free speech, as malign actors, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. An advisory panel under the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA), called the Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee, issued recommendations to CISA in June on how to address threats to “critical functions” of democracy, including public health measures, the financial system, elections and the court system. The subcommittee recommended CISA detect “informational threats,”...

This many high-profile failures in such a short time makes winning a Pulitzer look definitively like a mark of ignominy.The way the Pulitzer Prizes work seems simple enough – an Ivy league university hands out annual awards that ostensibly recognize important journalism. In practice, however, my former colleague Phil Terzian, a Pulitzer finalist who has served on the nominating committee, described the inner workings of the Pulitzers this way:The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited...

A group of professors is using taxpayer dollars doled out by the federal government to develop a new misinformation fact-checking tool called “Course Correct.” National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according to the grant abstracts, is intended to aid reporters, public health organizations, election administration officials, and others to address so-called misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

...Misinformation contains content that is false, misleading, or taken out of context but without any intent to deceive. When family members share bogus health claims or political conspiracy theories on Facebook, they’re not trying to trick you—they’re under the impression that they’re passing along legit information. In reality, they’re spreading misinformation. Examples of misinformation Misinformation ran rampant at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Consider claims of false COVID-19 treatments that spread across social media like, well, the virus they claimed to cure. Those who shared inaccurate information and misleading statistics weren’t doing it to harm people. In fact, most...

The Coalition for Trust in Health & Science today announced its formation and public launch during the 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The alliance was formed to unite leading organizations from across the entire health ecosystem to advance trust and factual science-based decision-making. The partnership aims to achieve a measurable increase in the public’s willingness – and ability – to access evidence-based information necessary to make the best personally appropriate health decisions for themselves, their families and the communities in which they live and work. Enhancing the perception and reality of...

As medical students and future pediatricians, we recognize that childhood vaccines are one of the single greatest public health achievements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet, for one of us, a pregnant cousin announced over the Thanksgiving dinner table that she wasn't going to vaccinate her unborn child. No matter the facts, research, or wealth of medical education, this cousin was firm in her beliefs that there was a better, healthier way to protect her child than vaccination. Unfortunately, her viewpoint is not at all surprising given the misinformed headlines that permeate our Instagram feeds such as "The Danger...

Johns Hopkins University professor Dr. Marty Makary blasted the federal government during the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s first hearing on Tuesday, accusing it of being “the greatest perpetrator of misinformation.” In a powerful opening statement, Makary rattled off multiple examples to support his claim. Misinformation that Covid was spread through surface transmission; that vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity; That masks were effective. Now we have the definitive Cochrane review. What do you do with that review? Cochrane is the most authoritative evidence body in all of medicine and has been for decades. Do you...

“The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government”

<p>After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will initiate a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation.</p><p>The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims. The videos will appear as advertisements on platforms like Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign in India is also in the works.</p>

Since U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf began his second tenure as the agency’s head in February 2022, he has made combating “misinformation” one of his top priorities, arguing it is “a leading cause of preventable death in America now” — though “this cannot be proved,” he said. In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press (AP), Califf, who also headed the FDA between 2016 and 2017, reiterated his pledge to “save lives” by policing online content. One year into his second tenure as FDA commissioner — and despite waning public trust in the FDA —...

The National Enquirer was fined $187,500 by the Federal Election commission for squelching a story about Donald Trump because they said it was a prohibited in-kind contribution to influence an election. Here's the story from the Associated Press:National Enquirer, caught in ‘catch-and-kill’ scandal, soldThe National Enquirer, the scandal-plagued tabloid that engaged in “catch-and-kill” practices to bury stories about Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, has been sold.The Federal Election Commission fined a360 Media $187,500 in June 2021 for squashing the McDougal story. The FEC said the publisher’s “payment to Karen McDougal to purchase a limited life story right combined with...

On the 112th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, we commemorate his many monumental accomplishments as the greatest president of the past century. But it is also a good occasion for correcting the record regarding the persistent, never-ending efforts to obscure those accomplishments with misleading smears. One attack on Reagan that has grown in the telling over the years is the claim that he invented a wartime story about having been present at the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The problem: The actual evidence of Reagan saying this is vague, thirdhand, and contradicted on the record by people who were...

n a recent addition to the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi revealed to the public how Twitter — the preferred social media platform of politicians, academics, and journalists — co-opted the algorithmic blacklist of a bipartisan neoliberal propaganda outfit known as Hamilton 68. Hamilton 68 was a digital dashboard that, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky recently discussed, was used to perpetuate and mainstream the myth of Russian interference in American politics through algorithmic censorship and suppression. But it wasn’t just egghead professors, left-wing activist journalists, and the tragically narcissistic (Adam Schiff) who perpetuated the thoroughly repudiated lie that Russia determined the...

A left-wing think tank erroneously claiming to track Russian online activity was responsible for thousands of bogus stories asserting the nation’s influence in US politics, according to the latest batch of Twitter Files. The Hamilton 68 “dashboard” was the brainchild of former FBI special agent and MSNBC contributor Clint Watts and operated under the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a think tank founded in 2017 — shortly after former President Trump took office. The ASD Advisory Council included such figures as top Clinton ally John Podesta, Obama-era acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former...

Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history. Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York...

On Tuesday, disgraced former CNN anchor Brian Stelter took to the stage at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting to chair a panel on "disinformation." The panelists claimed that the spread of fake news was among the greatest threats currently facing society, and praised Europe for its strict internet regulations. "How does this discussion of disinformation relate to everything else happening here today in Davos?" Stelter asked the panel, which included the New York Times' Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, European Commission VP Věra Jourová, Rep. Seth Moulton, and Internews CEO Jeanne Bourgault. "If you look at this question of disinformation," Sulzberger...

The nurse with Singapore General Hospital became wheelchair-bound and jobless following a COVID-19 vaccine injury.Singapore General Hospital (SGH) said on Monday (Jan 16) that a former nurse who lost her job after suffering a severe reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine is welcome to reapply to join the hospital "when she is better". Responding to CNA's queries, SGH's chief human resource officer Tan Yang Noi said the hospital will continue to stay in touch with the woman and give her support. CNA reported on Friday that the former nurse won an appeal against a court order to pay child maintenance, after...

Nearly half of Americans believe it is at least somewhat likely that coronavirus vaccines have caused a “significant number of unexplained deaths,” and over a quarter said they know someone whose death may have been caused by side effects of the vaccines, a Rasmussen Reports survey released Monday found. The survey asked respondents, “How likely is it that side effects of COVID-19 vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths?” Overall, 49 percent said it is at least “somewhat” likely, but of those, 28 percent said it is “very” likely. Another 20 percent said it is “not very” likely,...

The Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine called on tech corporations to censor “misinformation” about child sex changes. Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, advocated for big tech to censor what he referred to as “misinformation” in an address to the Federation of State Medical Boards in New Orleans in May. During the address, Levine remarked that health professionals “must continue and expand their work to address health misinformation directly.” He added, “I’d like to just talk briefly about another area of substantial misinformation that is directly impacting health equity in our...