Social media plagued by health grifters, scaremongering, & snake-oil peddlers, many with huge followings. I'm often asked to weigh in on claims and confirm whether someone is a pushing misinformation or not. Here's a useful heuristic for spotting health charlatans.. a🧵.. ..First question: Does claimant have relevant experience? Have they related qualifications, publications, or specific expertise to assess and make the claim they do? If not, that is a red flag. Also, important to dig beyond appearance: any grifter can pose in lab coat or scrubs

Whenever I see a guideline insisting we're all Vitamin D deficient, I get a sinking feeling I'm reading the legacy of bad science. Meta-scientists often complain how Vitamin D research is, as a field, so methodologically shabby as to be meaningless. How bad? Well let's dig in... Firstly, what *is* vitamin D deficiency? Methodologists say not to dichotomise a continuous variables for good reason, & medical scientists completely ignore this because they want pretty results. I looked at last 5 years of Vit-D obs. trials: Here's what it looked like..

Misinformation, disinformation and malinformation are rampant on social media, and their influence and prevalence will only get worse in 2024. I'm often asked what we can do to limit their harms. Here are some simple suggestions. A short thread 🧵 ..first, we need distinguish between them. Misinformation is the inadvertent sharing of falsehoods, disinformation is the deliberate propagation of the same, and the lesser-known cousin malinformation is the weaponisation of information out of context to mislead. All are harmful

So @joerogan insisting @PeterHotez "debate" notorious antivaccine spoofer RFK Jr shows Rogan fails to grasp debate is only useful if conducted in good faith. If one party lies, youre just giving them a vehicle to spread that lie to detriment of understanding. A short thread.. 🧵

https://twitter.com/joerogan/status/1670221537742340099

So debate is not an arbiter of truth. If one perspective amply supported by evidence, & another completely unsupported, giving them equal consideration merely because theyre opppsed has effect of allowing the unevidenced view leech an illusion of legitimacy, misleading people

Good grief - utter nonsense shared yesterday by @ABridgen and his ideological cohort claims COVID vaccines are dangerous has gotten huge traction, but its founded on an utter abuse of data. Let's look at precisely why its junk - Strap in, it's a thread... 🧵 ..firstly the source is Expose News, which solicits donations & pumps out conspiracy junk. They've taken publicly available ONS data, and presented it as shocking: for example, this is their figure (mislabelled as it is) of unvaccinated versus vaccinated deaths April-Dec 2021...

US Department of Energy (DoE) report on COVID origins & FBI director on Fox news has set cat among pidgeons again -so is a #lableak now more likely now?

No - and demands to investigate lab-leak narratives neglect basic principles of scientific inquiry; a thread 🧵 So first thing to note is the DoE report is classified, but concludes with "low confidence" - what does that mean in practice? That its unreliable, and not a basis for an analytical conclusion. Note that the report didn't change any other intelligence outfits minds either..

Alternative @jordanbpeterson -

"People who factcheck the copious rubbish and hateful fictions I spew forth to my gullible fan base are meanies"

Peterson's entire empire pivots on "pseudo-profound bullshit" - let's look at that - a short thread..🧵 ..when he's not busy pushing kremlin propaganda, climate denial, or hateful rhetoric, Peterson is best known for his best-selling 12 rules book. But stripped of all the fan adoration, its a twee self-help book full of empty platitudes. It's deep as a puddle..

So @BBCNews invited Aseem Malhotra on about statins, & he went rogue with disinformation on COVID vaccines. That was predictable & a damning failure of due diligence. Now he's bragging about mainstream exposure, a harmful victory for false balance. Do better, #BBC - disappointing ...seriously, a quick search would have shown even before the pandemic that Malhotra was criticised for flogging fad diets & dubious medical claims. In the last few years, he's become the UK's leading antivaccine voice. Why they ever invited him on I can't fathom, harm done.

This isn't "BOMBSHELL NEWS🚨🚨🚨" - it is abuse of data to arrive at a conclusion, and naked grifting. This tactic is very common in antivaccine activism and really scares people, so lets look at why its utter nonsense, and how to spot it in the wild. A thread 🧵 ...1st thing to note is that this refers to 4th dose, typically given to elderly & immunocompromised; people who, all things being equal, are far more likely to fall severely ill than younger people. If you look at the data, the most deaths are in the 90+ groups: not surprising.

Let's be very clear about this tweet: it is a dog-whistle to an extreme, violent, anti-science rightwing, draped in flimsy 'ironic' plausible deniability. Musk does not give a damn about public health or rational discussion. He is showing you who he is - believe it ..he knows damn well that Fauci was the subject of a litany of extremist threats, like many others in science and health through the pandemic. This is not an innocent mistake, it is a signal to the very people that embraced violence rhetoric. We hear it.

With Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11+ years in prison, her deliberate fraud at Theranos is in spotlight. Less has been said about how her claims were impossible in theory, dangerous in practice - and how investors should have known. A thread on screening, stats, and greed 🧵 Firstly, there is no doubt that Holmes committed outright fraud; @JohnCarreyrou captures that excellently in his book. But consider the Edison, which Holmes insisted would screen for a litany of conditions from just a miniscule drop of blood, simultaneously. A good idea?

In the event that twitter implodes entirely, I'll miss the thought-provoking interactions, but be less nostalgic over miasma of hate-mail, pile-ons, and disinformation this hellsite enabled. You'll find me here in interim instagram.com/david_robert_g…

#RIPTwitter #TwitterDown ...I think it's worth remembering while a nice idea, in practice twitter had serious problems, vectoring an awful lot of hate & poison. A problem perhaps soluble with strong moderation and good policy - but a petulant man-child like Elon Musk was only ever going to make it worse

60 years ago today on the 27th October 1962, human life on Earth came the closest it has ever come to a terrible ending. Everyone alive today owes their life to this handsome devil, and most of us don't even know his name. Let's change that - a thread 🧵 First, a little historical context - in October 1962, the Cuban Missile crisis erupted with USSR responding to American missiles in Italy and Turkey by spiriting missiles to Cuba. This stand-off is often considered the most dangerous moment of the cold war: that is not correct..

In less than 24 hours, a thread offering tips to avoid / fight cancer 'naturally' (mainly through diet⛳️) has gotten over 100k likes.

Sadly, the advice given is both wrong and dangerous, and *very* likely to cause harm.

A quick thread on why this is so misguided... 🧵 First ⛳️: stem cell quackery. No, you cannot boost stem cells with diet & nor would it likely be beneficial to do so (cancer stem cells are a thing too, btw) - this paper by @CaulfieldTim shows such claims are common, but utter nonsense futuremedicine.com/doi/10.2217/rm…

Remember the preprint that claimed COVID vaccines caused significant adverse effects, beloved by contrarians? Well it's now been published in an @ElsevierConnect journal - it *really* shouldn't have been, as it remains hot flaming garbage. Here's why...

STRAP IN, IT'S GRIM.. 🧵 ..so the authors basically took safety data from Pfizer and Moderna, and ran a post-hoc and totally arbitrary analysis on it. And lo and behold, they claimed to find harms. Only problem? It was complete tosh, as @JHowardBrainMD explained at the time.. sciencebasedmedicine.org/dont-do-this/

Anti-vaccine (& more broadly, fringe science) harassment is unrelenting. I've lost count of incidents where cranks have threatened me, bombarded my universities with complaints, written slanderous blogs, & tried hard to make life miserable. Fully understand why people step back..

https://twitter.com/MarcusBlimi/status/1560245721764438016

...my experiences aren't unique btw; this happens to *everyone* speaking publicly for vaccination. Nor is this a COVID thing specifically - folks like @gorskon getting it in neck for 20+ years, & first time I had to go to cops with credible threat was 2014. This is MO of fringe..

THREAD 🧵: Throughout pandemic, some scientists gained huge followings by making extreme, scary claims from limited data.

Some justify this, arguing exaggeration / hyperbole makes people do the "right thing".

I think this is morally & scientifically reprehensible. Here's why.. Firstly, it's utterly antithetical to communicating science.

Unjustified extrapolation, neglecting of caveats & limitations, & making statements beyond the confidence of the data really not conducive to public understanding of medical science.

Great for clout, though 🙄

I've said this before, but really depressing to witness the many scientists, doctors and academics gleefully contributing to a culture of misinformation during a pandemic, weaponising their social media feeds to push fringe or unsupported narratives to huge audiences.. ..had you asked me years ago if we needed more scientists and doctors talking to the public, I would have enthused a yes, because I foolishly presumed they would be bound by professional ethics to stick to evidence-based arguments. I really could not have been more wrong ..

A few days ago @boucherhayes had a fascinating thread about how Russian propaganda outfit RT tried to co-opt his work to sow the seeds of discord, well worth reading here. I have my own little RT story I thought I'd share too.. 🧵

https://twitter.com/boucherhayes/status/1498991990192623629

Way back in 2016, I had a bit of work on why scientific conspiracy theories incredibly unlikely to succeed. It got a press release by @UniofOxford, and media interest worldwide (must have been a slow news week). So media enquiries start rolling in....
bbc.com/news/science-e…

Yet again, @ClareDalyMEP & @wallacemick disgrace themselves, voting against a resolution condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine. The equivocation doesn't mask the unrepentant Putin apologism. They're either stooges or enablers, & unfit either way irishexaminer.com/news/politics/… ...in my thread on the history of Russian disinformation today, I didn't mention the fact that the KGB used to find clueless ideologues or fellow travellers to parrot their lines. Shameful that Irish MEPS continue the useful idiot tradition...

https://twitter.com/drg1985/status/1498588097084366851

Disinformation has been a constant element of Russia's war against #Ukraine. This is something at which #Russia excel, & it's important to understand how they do it, why it's effective, & how to spot it. A thread 🧵... Firstly, what is disinformation? It's the deliberate propagation of false information to mislead, or create false impressions. This is often achieved with fakery, or obscuring the true source of a claim (Black propaganda). Russia didn't invent such tactics, but mastered them..