Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers

Fact Check 1: Full Fact's Dr Fergus BROWN uses straw man argument while both denying, and accepting, that Covid-19 vaccines might have caused strokes and migraines.

On January 14th, 2023 I did a post titled Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers in which I considered both a Guardian newspaper article and a Full Fact fact check of the brief statement by Dr Aseem Malhotra when being interviewed by the BBC.

That post drew *a lot* of attention… and comments… and led to many people asking me whether I would consider doing a regular column analysing Fact Checks. While we are preparing a broader academic paper on the technical, social, behavioural and psychological evil that has become Fact Checking during the last three years, I have decided to post the actual Fact Checks that will form the Supplementary Material for that academic study here, for my readers.

Fact Check 1:

Full Fact’s Dr Fergus BROWN fact checks an Instagram Post

Dr Brown’s Fact Check is intended to rebut an Instagram post made about and attached to an image of a newspaper article headline that claims climate change is making migraines, strokes and dementia more severe and common. The Instagram post containing the headline decries the study and the newspaper headline as ‘peak stupidity’, and infers that the ‘experimental shot’ which governments have foisted on the general public by using psychological fearmongering, may actually be to blame.

Discussions with members of the Cambridge Sceptics group on Facebook led me to the website of a UK cosmetic dentist who they believed is the Fact Check Journalist (FCJ) Dr Fergus Brown.

However, I was able to verify that this Dr Brown was not the Dr Brown.

Dr Fergus BROWN the FCJ is, I believe, the young person in the image below.

He calls himself a Clinical Fact Checker on his LinkedIn profile and is currently employed by the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. And while I was able to identify two very recently qualified Fergus BROWNs on the General Medical Council website - both had been provisionally registered in 2020 and only became fully qualified and registered in August 2021.

…our Dr Brown appears to be linked to a branch of medicine known as Liaison Psychiatry yet he is not currently registered as having a specialty and his name was not on the register of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

However, it is debatable whether the very young, niaive and inexperienced Fergus Brown has the immunological, environmental, statistical or similar qualifications relevant to many of the types of fact checks on immunology, cancer, and even Pele’s feet! that he has been publishing with Full Fact. It does seem from his writing that he is bent on telling us that anything going wrong to an individual human being is environmental (read: climate) related. I’m not certain that this is a sound position for someone who will treat individuals with acute psychiatric disorders to begin from… but having spent several hundred hours on clinical placement in acute and forensic psychiatric wards myself, a distinction was often difficult to make between the flights of fancy and inherent madness of the patient and that of the psychiatrist purporting to bring the cure. The psychiatric nursing staff I was training with were often never quite certain which was crazier.

While he links to the paywalled journal article (here) that the Daily Mail article was about and quotes key facts from the study, those facts were already available from within the Daily Mail article that was the subject of the image (here). Therefore, there is nothing to suggest he actually downloaded and reviewed the content, methodology or even the authors of the academic research article (I will come to these issues in a future post). Indeed, he actually states that he has not investigated the quality of the research. Yet, it is from this shallow position that he sets out to rebut the Instagram poster’s implied suggestion.

The FCJ’s rebuttal begins by saying that whatever the journal article’s merits, it is not claiming there has been a recent post-vaccine rise in prevalence. He also says that the fact that neither the journal nor newspaper article claim vaccines are causing the health issues means we can conclude the Instagram post is misleading. This claim by the FCJ is in itself misleading to the reader, as his reasoning is a fallacy of relevance - or what some call a straw man argument. His conclusion purports to refute the statement made by the Instagram poster - except the Instagram poster never once claimed the Daily Mail or journal articles said vaccines caused the issues. The FCJ then goes on to link to other similar Full Fact rebuttals of comments made by social media users asserting headlines are covering up the fact that covid vaccines are causing health issues. He says these are a common trope of social media posts, and leaves the reader to believe the existence of other similar Full Fact articles validates and supports the accuracy of his own rebuttal.

Fact Check 4 - Review

Referenced sources:

The FCJ supports his fact check by claiming to have reached out to vaccine manufacturers Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna and that they referred him to regulator information that supports that their Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective and serious problems are rare.

This is not surprising. The vaccine manufacturers are hardly going to just come right out and admit to a Full Fact FCJ that their products have issues. However, and more critically, the conclusions that Dr Brown draws also ignore that the AstraZeneca vaccine alone has already been withdrawn in more than a dozen countries for the reason that it did actually cause some of the types of conditions described in the headline and journal article (migraines and thrombolytic strokes) - and, at a frequency and severity level that has seen coroners finding the AstraZeneca vaccine at fault (e.g.: here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Note that I found all these in under two minutes. Therefore, not only are coroners inquest and post mortem findings laying these adverse outcomes directly at the feet of the Covid-19 vaccines expressly not rare. They aren’t even difficult to find. Just to be clear - don’t shoot the messenger. I am not saying that the Covid-19 vaccines caused them. It is the Coroner, a suitably qualified person empowered to investigate the death of the individual that has said it.

Bias:

Based on the FCJ’s use of a straw man argument to reason his position in the first half of his article, and that he only used those few academic studies he could find that support his contention in the second half – we conclude that the level of media bias in this fact check article is high.  

Fact checking the fact checker:

In the second half of his article, the FCJ goes on to do his own brief and in small part, contradictory description of the situation for stroke, dementia and migraines. During this exposition he both denies, and admits, that the Covid-19 vaccines are linked to some of these health issues. His primary argument throughout seems to rest on the notion that just because someone reports one of these things following vaccination, it doesn’t mean the vaccine caused it. While this is arguably true, it is not in and of itself a defence when many studies that he choses to ignore have shown that serious adverse events like ischaemic and haemorrhagic stroke, migraine, myocarditis, pericarditis, and neuropathies like Bells Palsy, when aggregated, are occurring for more than 1-in-800 Covid-19 vaccine recipients (here). Another study published this week uses survey data to identify that covid inoculation fatalities could be as high as 278,000 individuals (here).

To conclude: This is not a small issue that should be so indifferently swept under the rug by someone who talks to crazy cat ladies and irrational teens upset about their exam results. As we saw with the links to articles where coronial inquests and post mortems have concluded that the Covid-19 vaccines are to blame, there is evidence that the FCJ should have considered and made available to his readers that strongly supports the association he so casually sought to deny.