Thread by @TuckerGoodrich

I was curious about this. Took a look at it this morning.

Americans "do not trust anything" in part because of work like this.

https://twitter.com/sekreps/status/1270680137722400768

In their intro they say:

"Rumors about death panels surrounded the Affordable Care Act, showing that the high stakes of public health is not inoculated from misinformation..."

To demonstrate that we have a problem...

Well, the death panel wasn't a rumor.

2018, @washingtonpost : "The Health 202: Republicans kill Obamacare's controversial "death panel""

washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost…

Or here:

"Death Panels: A Defense of the Independent Payment Advisory Board" [IPAB]

heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPag…

Or here:

"Meet the Real Death Panels"

motherjones.com/politics/2010/…

The Orwellian NICE, the "real death panel" above, was the inspiration for the IPAB:

"The origins of IPAB are found in the ideology of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the impetus of exploring health care costs..."

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21785484/

"Exploring health care costs" is of course a euphemism for deciding that granny isn't going to get some treatment, and is thus going to die.

(Which is an appropriate task in any health care system, I'll note, as resources are not infinite.)

So yes, when your paper about health misinformation starts by spreading health misinformation, it's hardly surprising that people might start to distrust such claims.

But that's not all!

The paper surveys people with "true", "fake", and "placebo" headlines, to see how they do. An interesting way to do it, but... (See attached.)

Under "Treatments" they list as True this: "Advice from Japanese Doctors Treating Coronavirus Cases: Drinking
water every 15 minutes reduces your risk of contracting the virus"

As you might imagine, this is not true, but is fake. They mention @snopes as a source, so let's check:

@snopes says it's false, of course.

"Taking a few sips of water every 15 mins will prevent the new coronavirus from entering your windpipe and lungs."

snopes.com/fact-check/dri…

Under "Responses" they list "Cities That Went All In on Social Distancing in 1918 Emerged Stronger for It" as True.

This one is a little more complicated, but I've already been through this on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/TuckerGoodrich/status/1248648560893190156?s=20

"Finally, it is important to note that the errors in Markel's article do not disprove the hypothesis that NPIs impacted the course of the pandemic [in 1918]. But any analysis of their historic use must be based on rigorous scholarship. His is not."

https://twitter.com/TuckerGoodrich/status/1248661151082336258?s=20

You can explore those links for more detail, but we'd have to rate that one as "partly False" at best, with a great deal of doubt in the rest of the work.

Certainly not True.

I'm sure these researchers thought they were well-meaning. But as a brief review of their paper makes clear, people are doubtful of everything because everything is riddled with errors, and unless you drill down on every alleged fact, it's only wise to doubt veracity.

Not everyone does what I did here, most either trust that the work has been done right (almost always a foolish assumption), or they doubt everything, even useful things like vaccines.

Researchers such as these must be held to a high standard, as I do here.

They fall short.

And until researchers and journalists start actually fact-checking things, they will have to deal with an incredulous public.

A public that has correctly evaluated that much of the information given them is false, or non-credible.