By Tatiana Prophet

It was a timely investigation: A contract research organization that took part in running Pfizer’s global Covid-19 vaccine trials had been accused of sloppy practices by several former employees, and their evidence was published Nov. 2, 2021, in the BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal).

But when Facebook’s fact-checking outfit, Lead Stories, discredited the exposé and called the BMJ — one of the world’s oldest and most influential medical journals — a “news blog,” the editors-in-chief had had enough.

“We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime,” wrote editors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi on December 17, in an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg “…Rather than investing a proportion of Meta’s substantial profits to help ensure the accuracy of medical information shared through social media, you have apparently delegated responsibility to people incompetent in carrying out this crucial task. Fact checking has been a staple of good journalism for decades. What has happened in this instance should be of concern to anyone who values and relies on sources such as The BMJ.”

Read the open letter here.

The article cited both named and unnamed sources accusing Ventavia Research Group of the following:
Participants placed in a hallway after injection and not being monitored by clinical staff
Adverse events not getting timely follow-up
Protocol deviations not being reported
Vaccines not being stored at proper temperature
Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and
Ventavia staff targeted for reporting these types of problems.

Godlee and Abbasi wrote that Facebook users were thwarted when trying to share the investigative piece, simply unable to share it, while others had their posts accompanied by “Missing context ... Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.”

The BMJ, formerly known as British Medical Journal is consistently ranked by Journal Citation Reports as having the highest impact factor in medical decision-making, along with the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

According to the editors, the article was published after “legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review.”

Read Paul D Thacker’s full article as published in the BMJ here.