The 152nd Block: Copycats and health misinformation
Scroll to the end for something about those darn drag queens.
This week…
A CBC report on Ontario’s plan to switch from biologics to biosimilars for residents who access medications through the Ontario Drug Benefit programme left a bitter taste in my mouth. In the 2:42-minute piece, the lower third says, “Ontario to swap original brand-name drugs with cheaper copycats.”
If I were to produce this piece, I would never use the word “copycat” in any part of this reporting. The baggage the word carries is a negative one and can be misleading.
The text version of the report is much more balanced and omits the word entirely. It explains in greater detail the difference between biologics and biosimilars, and provides links to previous reports and research that studied the risks of reduced efficacy in biosimilar drugs. Risks that come with biosimilars, while present—as is the case with any drug, vaccine, therapy, surgery and other forms of treatment—are low.
I also think the lede is buried in both versions; patients may receive a case-by-case exemption if the biosimilar drugs do not work effectively on them. The problem with the video report, which flashes on the bottom of the screen for almost three minutes that the provincial government is swapping to copycat drugs, is that it uses an alarmist and fallacious keyword. The word “copycat” is hardly ever used in a non-derogatory manner; the term carries negative connotations, whereas biosimilars are, in fact, legitimate imitations of drugs whose patents have expired.
While the rest of the written report is excellent in providing thorough arguments and contexts from the points of view of healthcare professionals, policymakers and patient advocates, all of which I do not contest, I simply cannot get over the careless use of such a deceptive and irresponsible word in the telecast, where not everyone would be sitting through the entirety of the piece. They might have just caught the little bit of it, read the misleading lower third, and could be left even more cynical of the public health system, which is already suffering from a lack of public trust.
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
My 6-year-old son died. Then the anti-vaxxers found out ($)
Billy Ball for The Atlantic:
My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse.
But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”
I’m a North Carolina–based journalist who specializes in countering misinformation on social media. I know that Twitter, Facebook, and other networks amplify bad information; that their algorithms feed on anger and division; that anonymity and distance bring out the worst in some people online. And yet I had never anticipated that anyone would mock and terrorize a grieving parent. I’ve now received thousands of harassing posts. Some people emailed me at work.
For the record, my son saw some of the finest pediatric-ICU doctors in the world. He was in fact vaccinated against COVID-19. None of his doctors deemed that relevant to his medical condition. They likened his death to a lightning strike.
Heather McDonald’s on-stage collapse became anti-vaccine fodder, but she’s alive and joking
Ben Collins for NBC:
Three minutes into the trailer for the widely debunked anti-vaccine film Died Suddenly, comedian Heather McDonald is shown collapsing on stage.
In the background, a voiceover from people identified as “whistleblowers” lays out the film’s mission statement.
“It’s the new bullet. It’s the new form of warfare,” the voice of a man in a darkened room says about the Covid vaccine.
“The dead can’t speak for themselves, so therefore, I have to speak for them,” says another.
The idea that she can’t speak for herself comes as a surprise to McDonald, who recently sat in her studio in Woodland Hills, California, prepping for her weekly podcast. She has published it every week since she passed out on stage in February 2022 at the Tempe Improv in Arizona.
The corrections dilemma: Admitting your mistakes increases accuracy but reduces audience trust
Dan Gillmor for Nieman Lab:
We have some good news for journalists who want to ensure that the public has the best and most accurate information. Corrections work. When you correct your errors, the people who see the corrections have a more accurate understanding of what you’ve reported.
We also have some bad news. After people see your corrections, new research shows, they have less trust in your reporting.
The News Co/Lab partnered with colleagues at Dartmouth College to gauge the effectiveness of journalistic corrections and their effect on audience trust. Our research team , led by Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth, surveyed 2,862 people for a paper titled “The Corrections Dilemma: Media Retractions Increase Belief Accuracy But Decrease Trust,” in the Journal of Experimental Political Science.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading Phil Christman’s piece on the allurements of conspiracy theory on The Hedgehog Review.
I’m listening to The Good, The Scaz & The Rugby with England captain Sarah Hunter who retired after the country’s Six Nations opener in her Newcastle hometown.
I’m watching the season finale of Succession.
Reviews, opinion pieces, and other stray links:
How TikTok became a breeding ground for hate speech in the latest Malaysia general election by Nuurrianti Jalli for The Conversation.
Our big problem is not misinformation; it’s knowingness by Jonathan Malesic for Psyche.
AI and the American smile by Jenka on Medium. Well, I have never seen my mother, or my mother’s mother, smile the ‘American’ way.
This is how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body ($) by N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza, and Manuel Canales for WaPo. [CW: Graphic 3D animation of what an AR-15 does to the human body.]
Chart of the week
For Our World in Data, Max Roser shows that the annual global corporate investment in artificial intelligence has grown rapidly: