Fact Checking the 1918/20 Pandemic
This blog looks at the accuracy of a Reuters fact check which states that the 1918/20 pandemic was not caused by a flu vaccine. It also looks at the development of flu vaccines during the pandemic and how many Americans were vaccinated.
Prof Francois Balloux
Director @UGI_at_UCL. Interest in Infectious disease epidemiology, pathogen genomics and global health Mastodon account: @FBalloux@genomic.social
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This fact check by Reuters is correct in the sense that the 1918/20 pandemic was definitely not caused by a flu vaccine (this claim is total, utter nonsense for various reasons).
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
1/https://t.co/zRTQnUNP30 -
Somewhat ironically though, the Reuters statement that no flu vaccine had been developed and inoculated to people at the time is incorrect.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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Several flu vaccines were developed during the 1918/20 pandemic in the US, and some were trialled, and administrated fairly widely. Up to ~2 million Americans may have ben vaccinated 'against flu' during the 1918/20 pandemic.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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Though, viruses were not properly understood at the time, and most scientists believed the agent of the 1918/20 pandemic was a bacterium, with in particular Pfeiffer's bacillus (Bacillus influenzae - now called Haemophilus influenzae) being a major suspect.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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For those interested in more detail, the article below provides an in depth summary of vaccine development efforts (and failures, and bizarrely successes, possibly due to protection against secondary bacterial infections) during the 1918/20 pandemic.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
5/https://t.co/h4q0n9hfPo -
Anyway, this is all too typical of an annoying recurrent process of outlandish claims being 'fact-checked' by some people who don't seem to have the necessary domain expertise, and in the process of 'fact-checking' just generate more noise.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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Robert Kennedy is intelligent and well read. I personally suspect he's also fundamentally honest, even if he systematically fails to understand that scientific evidence needs to be evaluated as a whole, rather than by cherrypicking the odd paper that aligns with our biases.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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If he publicly makes a claim, however absurd, there's likely a kernel of truth to it, which he probably came across in the scientific literature.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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It's not good enough (and Reuters are not the only ones I've seen making this mistake) to claim, "haha, there was no flu vaccine in 1918, you fool, gotcha!", because there were several (kind of), and Robert Kennedy likely read more about those than the average fact-checker.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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Fact-checking is hard, and requires domain expertise, and a good dose of humility. Also, good fact-checking is not based on gotchas, but on providing wider context explaining why factoid A does not imply consequence Y.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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Which I appreciate I didn't even touch upon in this already long thread ...
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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Some people have misunderstood a point I made. Honesty is orthogonal to being right or wrong. It's not synonym with an ability for introspection or self-doubt. Honesty can go hand in hand with righteousness and dogmatism. Honesty is about saying what one believes. That's it.
— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) June 28, 2023
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