Fact Check fail

RMIT/ABC Fact Check verdict: False, people who share this information are literally killing people.

Where are you seeing anything like this? Where was this rated "false". I have a feeling that if there is strawmanning going on here, it is by you. Social media is making this policy out to be nefarious and conspiratorial (thus the "informed" savior with the megaphone sharing the "truth" with people). As stated in the article, this is standard medical practice and has been for decades. If doctors give bad advice that goes against common medical knowledge and scientific understanding, they risk losing their jobs... or becoming an Internet doctor.

[To Bo Bennett, PhD]

'Where was this rated "false".'

It is titled: No ‘gag order' on GPs, regulator says.

The article admits doctors cannot go against government messaging.

It is the ABC's position that those who spread what they have labelled misinformation are responsible for people's deaths to Covid.

Do you agree?

How do you know it is bad advice just because it is contrary to government messaging?

If the doctors can't express anything negative, how are we to asses their claims and know it is bad advice?

It is not common knowledge that is important, it is real knowledge, which advances by challenging common knowledge. 

Do you agree? 

See my answer below where I address this.

How do you know it is bad advice just because it is contrary to government messaging? 

I wrote "If doctors give bad advice that goes against common medical knowledge and scientific understanding, they risk losing their jobs" not contrary to "government messaging." If government messaging is not consistent with common medical knowledge and scientific understanding, then doctors have an ethical/professional choice to make. In the medical community, there are proper channels to go through, including publishing and getting papers peer-reviewed. Vaccine efficacy is extremely well-researched and demonstrated. Doctors who reject this information for political or ideological reasons, or even on a "hunch," are acting irresponsibly.

If the doctors can't express anything negative, how are we to asses their claims and know it is bad advice? 

They can. "Anything negative" is your twisted interpretation that is not based on reality. Again, expressing to peers is not the same as expressing to patients.

It is not common knowledge that is important, it is real knowledge, which advances by challenging common knowledge.  

Fair enough. But there is some "white knight complex" going on here (also see galileo fallacy ). The vast majority of challenges to common/well-established knowledge is unfounded. The challenges to the common knowledge that the earth is not flat don't make those challenges justified, "brave," or even worthy or serious consideration.

[To Bo Bennett, PhD]

Thank you for your response, I will address a couple of your points now and the others later.

'If you look at the Wiki page on gag orders, you will see that they are in a different class than an employee going against a policy of the organization for which they work. '

While that's true, Wikipedia also goes on to say this about 'gag order':

'The phrase may sometimes be used of a private order by an employer or other institution.'

Perhaps you missed that part? We often use the broader definition in Australian and I believe it applies in this case, maybe it's different where you are.

That might be why they didn't make the same argument in their article that you seem to think is such a slam dunk in their defence. Nowhere do they talk about a narrow legal definition of gag order ruling this out as an example of one, because gag order can mean any time someone is prevented from speaking on a subject or saying certain things lest they fall foul of their employer, or licensing body, as Wikipedia states. Gag – prevented from speaking, Order – directive from an authority. Gag order.

The same wording, gagging, is used in this article on the story by the Australian Financial Review, who do a much better job of presenting both sides of the argument, quoting prominent doctors and other experts on their concerns with the policy as well as the regulators response, without dictating a true or false verdict, as obviously the doctors have a very strong case that their free speech, scientific freedom, and potentially the public's health, is being compromised by this policy, while the regulator can only appeal to the fallacious 'its boring and we always do it.'

The AFR also point to the withdrawal of various vaccines by governments worldwide due to unacceptable risks, as an indication that Australian government messaging is not necessarily based on the best or latest science, which our doctors should be free to share regardless of whether it agrees with government messaging or not.

https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/doctors-complain-of-gag-over-astrazeneca-vaccine-20210316-p57b4z

'Vaccine efficacy is extremely well-researched and demonstrated. Doctors who reject this information for political or ideological reasons, or even on a "hunch," are acting irresponsibly. '

I believe this is a strawman, as no-one claimed doctors should be able to go against good information for political or ideological reasons. I'm suggesting there may be cases where government policy is not based on the best information and that doctors should be able to make that fact public when it is the case. This policy criminalises that process.

I'd like to illustrate this with an example. To do so, I'll refer to another fact check we started discussing recently. In that thread, where I mentioned the misleading use of relative risk reduction (RRR) in isolation in the reporting off medical trials, you posted a fact check that supposedly debunked my claim. I posted a reply but you stopped responding. The reply was a quote from the British medial journal regarding RRR, here it is again:

''Relative risk measures have the advantage of being stable across populations with different baseline risks and are, for instance, useful when combining the results of different trials in a meta-analysis. However, they have the major disadvantage of not reflecting the baseline risk of the individuals with regard to the outcome being measured.'

'That is, relative risk measures do not take into account the individuals’ risk of achieving the intended outcome without the intervention. Therefore, they do not give a true reflection of how much benefit the individual would derive from the intervention, as they cannot discriminate between small and large treatment effects.'

'They usually tend to overestimate the benefits of an intervention and, for this reason, drug companies and the popular media love relative risk measures! Absolute risk measures overcome these drawbacks because they reflect the baseline risk and are better at discriminating between small and large treatment effects.'

So this quote from the BMJ comes with a kind of warning:

'They usually tend to overestimate the benefits of an intervention and, for this reason, drug companies and the popular media love relative risk measures!' 

This is relevant in assessing the fact check you posted that supposedly debunks the 'social media talking point... that might mislead the scientifically illiterate' (Your words.) What they are saying is that pharmaceutical corporations and media will try to use RRR in isolation, and we need to be aware of that in order to properly understand the reporting.

To cite another expert on risk reporting, Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Harding Centre for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute calls reporting RRR in isolation as being 'The first sin' against transparent reporting. He writes interesting articles (peer reviewed!) where he examines how RRR in isolation is used to make treatments, medical screenings etc. appear much more effective by only reporting it in isolation, without mentioning absolute risk reduction (ARR.) The reason is profit, there is no health or scientific reason to omit ARR from the reporting of medical trials or screenings except to maximise uptake of the product by exaggerating it's effectiveness. See this link for an example of Gerd's work. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47403563_Misleading_communication_of_risk

Now you would think that Reuters would be up to speed with the way statistics can be used by pharmaceutical corporations to mislead, after all they are there to hold the powerful to account, so surely they will quote these sources or similar in their fact check so that their readers can make informed consent with the best information and understanding possible.

Unfortunately, they don't do this. Instead, they try to spin it so that RRR seems like the most meaningful metric when it comes to understanding risk, a false claim, as we have already seen with reference to established medical and scientific knowledge from the quoted sources. You can read it here:

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-thelancet-riskreduction/fact-check-why-relative-risk-reduction-not-absolute-risk-reduction-is-most-often-used-in-calculating-vaccine-efficacy-idUSL2N2NK1XA

Why would a media corporation whose parent company's CEO also sits on the board of Pfizer spin its fact check so that Pfizer looks like the honest party and those who question their reporting look like anti-science conspiracy theorists and indirect murderers? Why would they omit the views of the BMJ and independent experts on the reporting of risk who consider Pfizer's reporting dishonest? It's a real mystery, I know. Maybe you can explain the nuance in this, its probably over my head, but I'm not a media health expert who job is to promote corporate products, they probably deal in a lot of nuance when it comes to science reporting.

So, let's say a doctor is aware of all this, and knowing the Covid vaccines are a treatment whose long term effects are unknown, decides that, in light of this low effectiveness (an ARR of between 5% and 28% calculated from a Pfizer study reporting RRR as up to 98%), taking the shot is not worth the risk of adverse reactions. As a responsible doctor, he informs his patients of the more accurate statistics and also creates a social media post so that he can share the information and help those who may have been misled by the reporting in the media.

He could lose his job, because his views do not agree with government messaging, which hold that the vaccines are highly effective, based on RRR. In addition, the public would be none the wiser concerning the misleading statistics, because his voice, and anyone's voice who agrees with him, would not be heard, affecting their health decisions in the future.

Do you think this is good public health policy? Do you think the government is basing it's policy on the best available and most accurate scientific understanding? Do you think this serves the interest of truth and good honest science? I don't think so.

You also might want to consider the following facts when judging the value and purpose of Australian government health policy in light of a gag order on doctors contradicting it:

Many politicians in Australia have financial ties to pharmaceutical corporations.

Pharmaceutical corporations have been fined billions of dollars, multiple times for ethical breaches including false reporting.

There is a revolving door between regulators and pharmaceutical corporations, so that those with a financial interest in selling drugs are in a position to set government policy regarding those drugs, including what is and is not approved for use, and what doctors can say publicly about them.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration, who have the authority to approve or reject pharmaceutical products for sale (or now mandating!) is 100% funded by pharmaceutical corporations.

Excellent rebuttal, doc. On point!

Fact checks also serve the purpose of providing nuance to a claim. This is what this appears to be doing.

I think this is critical , and needs to be emphasised to the public.

Fact-checkers do more than simply check to see if one part of a statement is true. If a speaker makes a true claim, but packages it in a way that is misleading (e.g. with loaded, prejudicial language, making irrelevant comparisons, etc), that should also  be pointed out - after all, the point of fact-checking is to make sure that people are not being deceived , not simply to tick a box that asks whether something is  literally  true or false. 'Simple facts' often have surrounding context that can cause someone to interpret them different.

Failing to properly clarify the role of fact-checking in democracy allows bad-faith actors to cast unreasonable doubt on the fact-checking process, though I also fault fact-checkers themselves for not being fully transparent about their methodology and objectives. I am also not denying the possibility that they could be biased (for instance, applying more scepticism to claims made by one candidate for office, compared to another).

Bending my rules here for a bit (this is quite a diversion from the main post and it has nothing to do with fallacies). Petra, when people don't respond to this nonsense from sites like "off-guardian," it doesn't mean because nobody can; it also means nobody will bother wasting their time. I have looked into some this that you posted and I can spend hours pointing out all the errors... but I'm not going to. You are better off posting these topics on conspiracy forums where you will find people with time on their hands that enjoy debunking and debating.

I am allowing this post because of the OP as it is tangentially related, but I will remove continued posts that focus on debunked conspiracies and nothing to do with fallacies. And no, not because I am part of the deep state trying to suppress the truth.

Well, Bo, I think I can bring a logical fallacy into the discussion now.

Petra, when people don't respond to this nonsense from sites like "off-guardian," it doesn't mean because nobody can;

Strawman fallacy
PolitiFact did respond but then didn't respond to the rebuttal of their response ... in which even the layperson can detect obvious errors.

I recognise I have a particular interest which isn't what your site is about, Bo. The thing is the subject at hand has intruded on our lives in an unprecedented way but I shall refrain from saying more unless it is in regard to logical fallacies.