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    Re: Dr Peter Doshi, BMJ ed. on changing definition of vaccine Archived Message

    Posted by Sinister Burt on December 4, 2021, 1:21 pm, in reply to "Re: Dr Peter Doshi, BMJ ed. on changing definition of vaccine"

    The rest has some background on dothi that suggests he might be a bit biased (tweets at link)

    "If Thacker’s muckraking (and not in a good way) report on Ventavia were the only example of The BMJ going wrong, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. Every publication makes missteps from time to time, and no editor’s judgment is perfect. Sometimes otherwise solid publications screw up. It happens. Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern.

    I first noted inklings of unease with The BMJ in 2017, when it published a couple of rather credulous “state of the art” reviews on “integrative medicine,” specifically, about using such “integration” of quackery with real medicine to treat chronic pain and headache. Again, these could have been missteps. It’s not as though The BMJ is the only respected medical journal to have published nonsense about “integrative medicine”. It is, sadly, a thing these days. Unfortunately, though, there is the case of Peter Doshi.

    The first time I can recall ever having mentioned Peter Doshi was in 2009, when he spoke at an antivaccine conference hosted by Barbara Loe Fisher’s National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) and, when contacted about it, responded with a transparent, “my speaking there does not imply endorsement”. (Remember that 2009 was the year when the H1N1 influenza pandemic was bearing down on us and that at the time Doshi had been fear mongering about the flu vaccine and questioning its efficacy.) Since then, he’s been nothing if not consistent. While all the while claiming he’s “not antivaccine”, he’s parroted more than a few antivaccine talking points himself while trying to portray himself as an authority on influenza and the flu vaccine. Through it all, he’s played the “victim” card that people who are borderline antivaccine or antivaccine love to play, claiming that they are “just asking questions” and that anyone who “questions” vaccines is labeled, in a knee-jerk fashion, “antivaccine”. In fact, Doshi’s borderline antivaccine stylings go back further than 2009, when senior pseudonymous epidemiologist whose blog I used to read religiously back then chastised him for an “unhelpful” commentary in which Doshi had claimed that estimates for yearly influenza deaths were “grossly inflated.” That was 2006.

    Since then, Peter Doshi somehow managed to become an associate editor of The BMJ. How this happened, I have no idea, but periodically he publishes posts for The BMJ that are—to put it kindly—far below the standards that a medical journal with the history of The BMJ should ever associate itself with. Early this year, for instance, he published one more such blog post entitled, Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% effective” vaccines—we need more details and the raw data. It was a post custom designed to try to claim that Pfizer and Moderna had exaggerated the efficacy of their vaccines through some statistical prestidigitation. He also called for the “raw data,” echoing a Thacker technique of cloaking dubious claims in issues that almost everyone can agree on, such as transparency in clinical trials. (John Skylar and Skeptical Raptor also discussed the deception behind his articles.) Doshi once also bought into a truly risible conspiracy theory about the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) that I hadn’t even seen from antivaxxers. There was much mockery. More recently, Doshi published more misinformation in The BMJ about COVID-19 vaccines, claiming that there was “no biodistribution data” (even though there was and biodistribution data aren’t required for vaccines anyway) and insinuating that the trials had been unblinded earlier this year not out of ethical concerns about leaving the subjects in the placebo group susceptible to a potentially deadly pandemic disease, but rather to hide differences in adverse events between the groups and to facilitate the ability of businesses and local governments to mandate COVID-19 vaccines not yet approved by the FDA but only available under an EUA. (I wrote about the issue of unblinding the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials in April. Suffice to say that it’s a complex issue of clinical trial ethics and science, far more so than what Doshi implies.)

    Indeed, Doshi has history of playing footsie with the antivaccine movement, amplifying antivaccine conspiracy theories, downplaying the severity of influenza and thus feeding antivaccine narratives, using sleight-of-hand to downplay the effectiveness of flu vaccines, and generally playing the role of a false skeptic with respect to vaccines. At this point, I can’t help but note that Doshi also once signed a petition “questioning” whether HIV causes AIDS. When called out on it by Steve Salzberg, he responded disingenuously:

    On the question of signing the HIV/AIDS petition, Doshi responded that “Seeing how my name was published and people have misconstrued this as some kind of endorsement, I have written the list owner and asked for my name to be removed.” He declined to state directly that he agrees that the HIV virus causes AIDS—though I gave him ample opportunity.

    Here’s what Peter Doshi signed and then only asked for his signature to be removed from the document after being publicly called out. It’s a petition “questioning” the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS, and the Wayback Machine shows his name in the list of signatories.

    No surprise, Peter Doshi has his own author page over at RFK Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense of articles republished from The BMJ under a Creative Commons license, his most recent “contribution” being an op-ed in which he laments calls for state medical boards and medical specialty boards to take action against the medical licenses and board certifications, respectively, of physicians spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Let’s just say that we at SBM disagree strongly and, if anything, think that state medical boards have not gone nearly far enough to protect the public.

    It goes beyond that, though. Peter Doshi actively has actively allied himself with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. For instance, he served as one of the expert witnesses last year for the plaintiffs in Children’s Health Defense’s lawsuit against the University of California opposing its flu vaccine mandate:


    More recently, there’s been this:

    Here is is as well:


    For those of you not familiar with him, Ivor Cummins, a.k.a. “The Fat Emperor,” is one of the more famous COVID-19 contrarians, and his approval should be a red flag right there. That’s right. Peter Doshi testified before Senator Ron Johnson’s panel on COVID-19 a week ago, ostensibly about “COVID-19 vaccine injuries and mandates“. We’ve met Sen. Johnson before in the context of his promotion of dangerous “right-to-try” legislation. Since the pandemic, he has, predictably and like so much of the rest of the Republican Party, pivoted to become a COVID-19 pandemic minimizer and an opponent of COVID-19 vaccine mandates to the point of parroting antivaccine talking points. In his testimony, Doshi denies that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” citing a report from July from the UK that most hospitalizations are among the fully vaccinated. It turns out that this report was in error, substituting “vaccinated” for “unvaccinated” and the majority of hospitalizations were among the unvaccinated, even though they made up only 31% of the population at the time. He even cites cherry-picked tables to claim that the vaccine doesn’t save lives in what is basically an updated rehash of the nonsense he peddled in May (also deconstructed by Dr. Hilda Bastian). In a truly risible moment, he even cites the Merriam-Webster definition of “antivaxxer” as opposed to those supposedly opposed to mandates to argue that he and his fellow COVID-19 contrarians are “not antivaccine” and that large numbers of people would qualify as “antivaccine”. He even parrots the antivaccine talking point that mRNA vaccines are not really vaccines and therefore shouldn’t be mandated like vaccines. I kid you not.

    I was flabbergasted. I knew Doshi was bad. I’ve known it since 2009. However, until I saw this video clip even I never realized he was this bad. I used to say that Doshi was not antivaccine. I’m no longer so sure and am leaning towards believing that he is antivaccine, based on his long history on the H1N1 vaccine, other vaccines, and finally the COVID-19 vaccines. Indeed, at the very least I have to agree with Dr. Zoë McLaren:


    In the meantime, Paul Thacker has published some doozies of conspiracy mongering articles about the “lab leak” hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2 origins.(He even bought into a narrative beloved of cranks that discussion of the origins of the pandemic has been “suppressed” by labeling any discussion of lab leak hypotheses as a “conspiracy theory”, referring to it as a “conspiracy to label critics as conspiracy theorists.” (Meanwhile, on his own Substack, he explicitly buys into the “Fauci lied” narrative spread by US Sen. Rand Paul and right wing media.) I don’t want to go into detail about these conspiracy theories, given that I’ve discussed them before, other than to say that, recent news reports of “gain of function” notwithstanding, it is still incredibly unlikely—arguably impossible, even—that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a laboratory, be it in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic appears to have originated or anywhere else. It is only slightly more likely than that that COVID-19 could have arisen due to the escape of a natural coronavirus being studied in a laboratory, but a natural origin due to a “spillover event” from an animal reservoir (most likely bats) remains far, far more likely than the incredibly unlikely possibility of a lab leak of a “gain-of-function” engineered coronavirus or a natural bat coronavirus being studied causing the pandemic.

    Finally, before I conclude it is necessary to recount a bit of Paul Thacker’s history. Besides being known for promulgating anti-GMO conspiracy theories, this is a “journalist” who is known for using abusive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in order to harass scientists, in particular Kevin Folta. More recently, Steve Novella discussed how Thacker attacked him (and me) as “vaccine cheerleaders” based on our supposed denial and downplaying of potential complications due to the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines. Thacker was, as usual, peddling nonsense, of course, because neither Steve nor I (nor other science bloggers targeted by him) had actually denied or tried to “sweep under the rug” the clotting complications being reported for that vaccine last spring. Rather, we had adopted a “wait and see” approach given the relative rarity of the complication reported. It didn’t take us long to acknowledge that the specific clotting problem attributed to the vaccine was very likely in rare cases caused by the vaccine. Thacker, as usual, misrepresented caution for “vaccine cheerleading” and denial that vaccines could ever cause harm. It’s what he does and why I expect that I will soon be subjected to yet another article by Thacker smearing me. It’s coming. I’m willing to endure it, though, if this post forces Thacker to publish more of the evidence behind his article and provide at least some of the details enumerated above that were missing, so that I can at least have a shot at judging the actual severity of the allegations made by his whistleblower. Right now, I just can’t, and certainly I know not to take Thacker’s word for anything.

    Too bad that The BMJ doesn’t know that.

    Sadly, I can now see a bit more why The BMJ has fallen so far, at least in its reporting, if not the science it publishes. Its editor-in-chief, Fiona Godlee, recently echoed Thacker’s conspiracy mongering in an official editorial for The BMJ, calling for a “full and open independent investigation” into the origins of SARs-CoV-2:

    But, as Paul Thacker explains (doi:10.1136/bmj.n1656), suppression of the lab leak theory was not based on any clear evaluation of the science. Indeed, it happened despite no good counter-evidence for the alternative: natural spillover from animals to humans. Instead the lab leak theory sank under the weight of a concerted campaign by heavily conflicted scientists, leading to a “year of biased, failed reporting” by science journalists and journals. Now, thanks to the seismic shift in US politics and some dogged and fearless journalism, the theory is emerging from the shadows into mainstream public debate. We don’t know which theory is right, but a lab leak is plausible and worthy of serious inquiry.

    This paragraph could have been published verbatim by Fox News or on any number of websites run by COVID-19 contrarians, and the part about there being “no good counter-evidence” for natural spillover as an origin is just plain wrong, given everything that we know about previous pandemics and the nucleotide sequence of SARS-CoV-2. Indeed, it is irresponsible in the extreme to have written “we don’t know which theory is right” without providing the context of which one is more likely to be correct. (Also, it’s a hypothesis, not a “theory”. In science, the word “theory” implies a much higher level of confidence than is justifiable in this context.) I outright cringed as I read Godlee’s article, having discovered it when I wondered what else The BMJ had published by Thacker besides his most recent “exposé”. It was incredibly disappointing to me to see the editor of The BMJ write something like this op-ed.

    Unfortunately, Thacker’s most recent “bombshell” is yet another example of how The BMJ has gone astray, at least in terms of its news reporting and commentary, over the last several years. Peter Doshi, for instance, has now been with the journal for several years, despite many of us asking why the heck he’s still an editor, and Thacker is just the most recent symptom of the rot. I note that Doshi, for instance, has defended Thacker’s story as having been “rigorously fact-checked“. Unfortunately, it’s not the individual “facts” that he uses to weave a deceptive narrative; rather, it’s how he weaves those “facts” together to tell a story while leaving out important context, something all skilled propagandists know. Reluctantly, as I’ve observed the descent of The BMJ‘s news reporting and commentary to the level of conspiracy theory and supporting antivaccine narratives, I must conclude that the rot must start at the top. It’s not as though the problems with The BMJ‘s reporting and having an editor like Peter Doshi haven’t been pointed out for a long time now.

    Think about it this way. If one of your editors and one of the freelance reporters that you’ve been publishing have their own pages at an antivaccine website, which republishes their work enthusiastically to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines and COVID-19 public health interventions, you really are doing things very, very wrong and contributing to pandemic misinformation in a huge way, given The BMJ‘s status."

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