Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Aaron McNally's avatar

Thanks for the thorough write-up! I've been curious about that character, and have also been a little dismayed by the knee-jerk representations. Appreciate the care and time you took.

Expand full comment
aram saroyan's avatar

I appreciate your taking him seriously and agree he shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. But I see the discussion of all-cause mortality a little differently. A lot of misinformation operates by saying true things that imply false things. The speaker can defend themselves by saying that everything they said was literally true, while a lot of their audience takes away the false message. Like "There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood and also finance, and there is a Israel lobby, etc." The speaker never said there was a giant Jewish conspiracy but there is an inference there that a lot of people will hear.

The sign of a true statement being misinformation is when it's stated in a way consistent with the misleading implication, and the misleading implication isn't explicitly refuted. The statement "15 patients who received the vaccine died; 14 who received placebo died" suggests (to someone who doesn't know stats) that maybe the vaccine _increases_ all-cause mortality, for example. RFK never said that, but the implication is there. The giant omission is that the study is not powered to look at all-cause mortality. One might turn that into a more valid critique of the vaccine, like "look, if it doesn't affect all-cause mortality in a statistically significant way for 44000 random adults, the health benefits probably aren't huge". That is not what he said.

In this case, the tweet isn't even true on its face. He writes "The pivotal clinical trial for the @pfizer #Covid vaccine shows it does nothing to reduce the overall risk of death". But the trial doesn't show the vaccine does nothing; it shows that the ratio of death rates is probably between 0.5 and 2. That is very different from "shows it does nothing". (caveat: I haven't calculated those numbers carefully. But I think they're in the right ballpark.)

Expand full comment
14 more comments...

No posts