Full Fact – a ‘fact-checking’ website funded by Google, Facebook and George Soros – has been lobbying MPs to include “health misinformation” in the Online Safety Bill. This would force websites to remove “harmful” “misinformation” relating to health – including off-narrative information about COVID-19, lockdowns, masks and vaccines – or face crippling fines.
Last week Full Fact – which received 70% of its 2019 declared funding from Big Tech companies – sent an email to its subscribers urging them to write to their MP and ask him or her to address the “gap” left by the Government’s rejection of the Labour and SNP amendment that would have added “health misinformation” to the online ‘harms’ prohibited by the Bill. Full Fact’s Policy and Parliamentary Relations Manager Alison Trew wrote:
Two years on from the outbreak of a global pandemic, it should be obvious that false or misleading claims about our health should be included in the types of online content addressed by the Bill.
A few weeks ago Full Fact’s Chief Executive, Will Moy, warned MPs that as it stands, the Online Safety Bill fails to meet the Government’s aim to make the U.K. the safest place in the world to be online.
Our fact checkers have seen first hand how COVID-19 misinformation has undermined public health, conspiracy theories have led to offline attacks, and disinformation – including on the war in Ukraine – has spread unchecked.
Digital minister Chris Philp told MPs this week that the Government agreed with the intention behind the amendment to tackle harmful health misinformation. And yet, disappointingly, the Government voted against the proposed changes.
This leaves a huge, and dangerous, gap in the Online Safety Bill. But there is still time for Parliament to close it.
Here’s the email in full.
Full Fact, which describes itself as “the U.K.’s independent fact checking charity”, is, according to some critics, a politically one-sided organisation with a history of partisan interventions in political debates. Government Minister Dominic Raab once said of it: “Who said Final [sic] Fact is the final arbiter of what the public get to see as the truth? There’s no God-given right, set in law. It doesn’t sound to me like they like the competition.”
However, various organisations including Google and Facebook, use Full Fact to inform them as to what ‘misinformation’ should be removed from their platforms. Worse, there’s a strong possibility that supplementary legislation accompanying the Online Safety Bill will instruct the big social media platforms to restrict or remove ‘misinformation’, forcing YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to remove any content designated as such by sites like Full Fact, or face swingeing fines from Ofcom (up to 10% of a social media company’s annual global turnover). Ofcom said last year that its “list of claims that could be considered false or misleading is provided to us by Full Fact”. It seems inappropriate, to put it mildly, that such a close relationship should exist between a state agency tasked with regulating big social media companies and a company that receives the lion’s share of its income from those very same companies.
Full Fact claims to be an “independent and impartial charity with a cross-party board”. But an investigation by David Scullion for the Critic found cast doubt on this claim.
The organisation claims to have a board of trustees with “members from the three main UK-wide political parties”. There is a Labour Peer (Baroness Janet Royall), a Lib-Dem peer, (Lord John Sharkey) but their former Conservative Party member, Lord Richard Inglewood, no longer sits as a Tory. When I asked Full Fact who their Conservative member was they pointed out that one of their trustees donates to the Conservative Party and that they have “representatives of different political parties” on their board. This is different wording which allows for the fact that they don’t, or aren’t sure whether they have a Conservative Party member amongst them. I pointed out that a donor was different to a member, but I did not receive a reply and the text on their website was not corrected.
Scullion notes that the departing editor was an ex-Mirror and Buzzfeed reporter, and concludes: “Full Fact is a charity with a small output of research compared to its size, funded primarily by big-tech and staffed to a large extent by former public sector workers or ex-reporters from left-wing media.”
Incidentally, Baroness Royall is the President of Somerville College which introduced mandatory unconscious bias training at the beginning of 2021. Not only were all students expected to take the course, but it was also mandatory for them to score 100% in the end-of-course assessment, which included such questions as: “Acknowledging your personal feelings about particular groups or individuals is a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias.” Unless students answered “yes” to this question – an extremely contentious claim for which there is little robust research evidence – they would not score the “required” 100%. It was only after the Free Speech Union wrote to Lady Royall, pointing out that this requirement was almost certainly unlawful, that it was dropped.
Full Fact misleadingly claims no one has to listen to it: “We don’t ask people to take our word for any conclusion we make. We provide links to all sources so that readers can check what we’ve said for themselves.”
But when major internet sites and broadcasting regulators are relying on it to tell them what content to restrict or remove, and when it has a “Head of Advocacy” and a “Policy and Parliamentary Relations Manager”, its claims to merely be providing an advisory service look pretty threadbare.
Full Fact often gets things wrong. In February 2020 it joined in the now discredited effort to pour cold water on the lab leak theory, stating: “There’s no evidence that the 2019 coronavirus originated in a Chinese Government laboratory”, despite many scientists at the time suspecting, based on the evidence, that was the case. Last year the site claimed the Daily Sceptic was being misleading in reporting Government data showing infection rates higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. It wrote:
This data had already caused widespread confusion, because it seemed to show for the month in question (August 9th to September 5th) that people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s were more likely to test positive for Covid if they had been vaccinated than if they hadn’t. In particular, a chart displaying the data seemed to give this impression.
Despite our pointing out to Full Fact that the Government data and chart didn’t “seem” to show this but plainly did show it, and this was not a result of “confusion” or a mistaken “impression” on anyone’s part and the only party guilty of ‘misinformation’ was Full Fact in attempting to muddy the waters about this, no correction was forthcoming.
Websites and other media checking one another’s facts is of course a worthwhile activity – and if anyone points out a genuine mistake in any of our articles we correct them. That’s one reason free speech is so important – it allows people to correct one another by drawing attention to new or overlooked evidence. But using politically one-sided fact-checking sites as a basis for censorship, as many websites and Government regulators are now in the habit of doing, is a fast-track to an authoritarian society where only officially approved speech and Government-endorsed ‘facts’ are allowed. It’s no surprise that Full Fact wants to use the Online Safety Bill to force websites to conform with the pronouncements of sites like itself. But that’s no reason for a Government that claims to care about freedom of speech to go along with it.
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Thank you for your insights, but frankly, I find it so shockingly naive that I’m not quite sure where to start. There are so many parallels between pharmaceutical behaviours and that of Criminals behind bars currently serving crime for truly evil behaviours, that I can’t actually command the energy to respond. It just reminds me of someone who has become so inured to the disregard for human life that they cannot comprehend that what they are witnessing is systematic annihilation. Like soldiers in Iraq clearing dead bodies with a bulldozer so they the military vehicles can pass.
It is shocking and crushing to discover that your industry and by extension you, have been complicit in doing much human harm. (I have been there myself). Especially when you entered it first altruistic reasons, and with high hopes. But you do owe yourself the examination needed to actually hold your industry to account.
And as to genocidal cabals? Who knows. Not you and I. They certainly don’t seem to be needed if outcomes are to be judged.
I am very certain nobody is actively trying to make a vaccine that harms people.
Governments and regulators have removed the barriers and safeguards you would usually expect to expedite vaccine development. This carries risk. We are seeing these risks materialise. Personally I don’t think it was the right thing to do, but if you are CEO at Pfizer or Moderna, you are probably thinking “great! I can use this crisis to accelerate development of this technology we have been developing for years and hopefully make some money…especially if we are first to market. And then use this technology for future vaccines”
They have a vested interest in the vaccines being safe and efficacious. It helps their reputation, it helps their share price. The fact that they are perhaps not as safe as one might like, would lead to them being abandoned (in my opinion) if the threat of COVID were given anything like a sensible risk assessment and everyone were behaving rationally.
So now there is a motivation to maintain the fear. And for governments too, given that they are committed to buying loads of vaccines regardless. They don’t want to look like they overreacted,
I don’t think I am naive. I’m incredibly cynical compared to many in my industry. Maybe I am a unique case, but I have never seen anything in all my years in the companies I have worked in that has made me feel like patient safety wasn’t a priority, balanced against the benefit of treatment. COVID has skewed that, as it’s being treated like raging global Ebola, when plainly it is not.
I didn’t ask for my comment to be posted as an article so I am not about to get into a debate about it. I am just reporting what I have seen, Money and reputation, that’s what drives actions at CEO level.
Many thanks Sophie. A balanced account that carries a sound ring of truth and plausibility.
Seconded. And will all those people who have had their lives or those of their families, saved by pharmaceutical interventions such as semi-synthetic penicillins, beta-blockers, analog insulins, antidepressants, etc., etc., etc. please calm down and reflect on the totality of what the pharmaceutical industry has provided
Thanks – but that’s not to say I don’t think there may be some serious problems with the pharmaceutical industry – although Sophie’s post quoted above the line does, I think, implicitly concede that.
I’m surprised that someone “incredibly cynical” can continue to work for Big Pharma. Must cause a lot of cognitive dissonance.
They certainly wouldn’t want to harm people if they had to cough up financial compensation for side effects, but that essential safeguard against corporate greed and short-cuts is currently missing.
Even so, once the damage actually being done by these experimental gene therapies is pointed out (as it has been from the beginning of the roll out) is it still OK to turn a blind eye and keep rolling this stuff off the production line rather than stop, think and go through a full testing program?
Harsh on the author.
And unfair.
So he’s saying (1) that Big Pharma is just doing what governments want it to do? Google “Pfizer” and “$2.9 billion fine” — hardly an example of government-Big Pharma cooperation. Also, read the British Medical Journal investigation of 2010 into the role of “experts who had declarable financial and research ties with pharmaceutical companies producing antivirals and influenza vaccines” for the 2009 influenza scamdemic. https://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c2912
Could we say the same about the BMGF? Have they now withdrawn their funding from the organisations that have been issuing wildly exaggerated projections of deaths in the non-lockdown case? Have they now withdrawn their funding from ResearchGate for censoring scientists? Have they now withdrawn their funding from all those organisations that systematically sidelined and demonised cheap, safe and effective prophylactics and treatments that might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives? Or are they OK with these things?
It’s called Capitalism.
Or selective capitalism, apparently Mr Johnson doesn’t believe it to be the case for football and the Superleague.
Whether on not one agrees with all the details here, I reckon the article provides a good overview of the fact that there are always a network of forces determining a particular outcome at the system level.
There’s always a tendency tho simply vilify individuals, and whilst that may be justified (see : ‘Johnson’), it’s not the whole story.
The last point is the crucial one :
“They will only do things that make money, or might make them money in future. They are not charitable organisations. Drug development is risky and expensive, and shareholders want their returns. Sounds obvious, but it underpins everything and people seem to forget that at times.”
Or as another commentator has said (above) :
“It’s called Capitalism”
Trying to abolish that impulse is futile, but it goes terribly wrong if no checks and balances are in place. The whole Covid debacle has been about that systemic flaw.
Part of the problem is pharmaceutical IP rights, which are relatively recent; some European countries didn’t recognise IP on drugs until the 1970s. IP rights are not the same as physical property rights, they are about creating monopolies; there’s an interesting (free of course) book on this theme here: http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm . Germany had a flourishing pharma industry without IP in the early 20th century. Without IP rights, priorities for COVID would have been testing low-cost prophylactics and treatments, there would have been no incentive for the lockdown/mask theatre, there would have been no epidemic of malnutrition in low-income countries.
Thus my comment about ‘checks and balances’. This covers a whole range of issues, from the basic constitution (or lack of) to such nitty-gritty specifics as IP rights that you mention.
If government is allowed to ally simply with the most powerful interests, without checks, the the whole political process becomes corrupted. Like fly-paper, it attracts money-grubbers and power-seekers much more than a wider representative selection of candidates.
The whole process then enters a downward spiral as the token vilification of politics and politicians reinforces exclusion rather than inclusivity.
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi … ‘this experimental vaccine roll out is so “goddamn dangerous” I cannot understand how my own colleagues don’t realize this?’
Worth watching …
https://twitter.com/_taylorhudak/status/1385067952534401027
A ‘must watch’.
Yes: it really beggars belief that ANYONE (even the politicians) would give such an enormous hostage to fortune.
Just imagine what the consequences would be if, say, 1% of the jabbed develop serious ill-health within a year or two of being vaccinated – that would really put a strain on the NHS! And the politicians think they could avoid blame after all their assertions of safety?
Big Pharma was in trouble until Covid came along.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks!
Not at all. In the same framework, I don’t reckon all Tory voters are inherently evil.
Sophie 123 can expect a promotion, or at least an index linked pay rise, for this bit simplistic white-washery. The term ‘Evil’ should perhaps be banned from all rational discourse in the first instance, as opposed to it being held up in the headline as an indefinable mediaeval moral yardstick against which to judge corporate ethics. Such methodology renders rational discourse meaningless.
If the final paragraph is not the most disingenuous, it is certainly the most naive:
Nobody forgets this, Sophie, but everybody is encouraged to overlook the big fat indemnification bribe that has effectively upset the delicate corporate RISK-BENEFIT control mechanism. As the AZ exec member said July 2020, the company could not have gone into production without the global guarantee of exemption from civil action (regarding death, side effects etc, from the experimental vaxx) being in place.
This is the main issue here, for with these rushed C19 experimental vaxes (whether mRNA or GMO) there is NO RISK attached for Big Pharma in taking short cuts, and the corresponding rewards for ditching medical ethics are of course potentially massive. The companies don’t have to be ‘evil’ to be in breach of long established codes of practice – just creative with their ethical code and less than thorough with their testing.
Might I ask if any Pharma company has refused this global exemption, insisted on the full carefully monitored trial period before release, and then agreed to stand four square behind its product financially?
This is a very helpful comment. Tullock and Buchanan were awarded a Nobel Prize for coming up with the economic theory of Public Choice – stated simply, that ‘actors’ and institutions act out of ‘enlightened self interest’. This is exactly what you appear to be describing. The same will be true of Whitty, Valance, Ferguson and SAGE, Farrar, the various civil servants involved – and of course the power hungry politicians. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the influential figures are acting out of self-motivation and are not necessarily evil or acting with malintent (although some sure seem to be). The law (as well as ethics and human rights codes, and pandemic preparedness guidelines, and so on) – and parliament – should have protected us. They didn’t. That needs to be addressed quickly.
“ the economic theory of Public Choice – stated simply, that ‘actors’ and institutions act out of ‘enlightened self interest’.”
Like most economic theory – a partial rather than general explanation in this most overblown of the social sciences. (see the number of dickheads sporting a first in PPE!).
See “Money Vs Science” on Youtube. A nine minute watch and well worth it.
“How to Understand Big Pharma: They’re Not Evil, But They Do Want Money”
Except that money is the route of all evil.
“money is the route of all evil”
Another bit of pat nonsense.
Have you taken up the hermit’s life yet?
What hermits life? Have to say I find your contributions on here patronising in the extreme. I realise from your posts that we’re all supposed to bow down to your superior knowledge but frankly I think you’re a tosser.
Getting into ad hominem stuff is never a good idea if you have a coherent point to make.
I was just expressing a dislike of simplistic untruth in the same league as ‘Covid is unprecedented’. As to the ‘hermit’s life’ – it was just an ironic question as to whether you’d forgone worldly goods to back up your claim – or whether you – like most of us – continue to use money and are thus encouraging evil?
… and who’s asked you to ‘bow down’? Just argue back – or follow the other saw about heat and kitchens.
Sorry you’re upset – but not much I can do about that.
Actually, the correct wording is ‘the love of money..’ etc.. Poor old money always gets it in the neck.
I think the phrase is “The love of money is the root of all evil”
Thank you very much for your informed insider view. Much of it perhaps to be expected but some interesting surprises.
Blimey, you might as well say “they’re not evil but they do want racial hygiene”. Remind me what is the root of all evil?
Although all the commentary is related to the pharma trade, it is also valid w.r.t. many industrial structures, and associated political activity, such as all branches of transport technology, power delivery and so on. More of a psychological issue, in fact.
I’m not criticising Sophie123’s article though; it’s a good job, well done.
Yes, I’ve seen it in an entirely different industry.
As ever, it’s all about the money, honey ( oh, and power and control)
I’m sorry, but it’s just win win for big pharma. Regardless of whether or not they want side effects from their products, there ARE side effects, for millions of people, many adversely impacting on people’s quality of life and physical and mental health, many serious, some fatal. But rather than make those drugs safer, unless the product is withdrawn (presumably due to external pressure), big pharma profits again by developing and selling drugs to treat the side effects, drugs which have the their own side effects, and so it goes on (until the patient or gp says no more drugs, or until the person dies). It is an industry based on and driven by profit and greed (otherwise drugs would be much more affordable and safer). If any drugs or vaccines are pulled from the market, you can bet that those drug companies have another to replace it up their sleeve. Look how quickly the covid vaccines were ready to be rolled out! No questions asked. Anyone working within big pharma turning a blind eye to the harms and suffering caused by those drugs to millions of people (many of whom didn’t need the drug or vaccine in the first place!) are complicit. And now they want to test their covid vaccines on toddlers and children?! If that’s not evil, I don’t know what is.
Wakey wakey. Pharmaceuticals are chemicals produced to work on relieving/removing problems with the body’s chemistry. ALL product have side effects as they are foreign to the body. Generally, the more powerful the product, the bigger the side effects. There is a view that if the product has no side effects then it won’t be very effective.
There are many effective natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals, but the medical industry isn’t interested in these because there’s no profit to be made. “The more powerful the product, the bigger the side effects”. So, poisoning people back to health. What could possibly go wrong.
Many pharmaceuticals ARE natural products or are derived from them. And naturally occurring agents frequently have worse side effects than purely synthetic ones. One reason for modifying naturally occurring agents is to produce derivatives with less serious side effects. The idea that something natural is inherently innocuous is ignorant superstition. Many of the most lethal poisons known to science are natural products.
I never said all naturally occurring agents are inherently innocuous. So you are either trying to gaslight me, or you are just stupid. Or both.
The problem isn’t that the pharmaceutical industry favours synthetic over natural products. There’s no essential difference between them. It’s that it favours medications that need to be taken long term as these provide the highest profits. That’s why we’re running out of effective antimcrobials to treat evolving bacterial strains. Most research into new antibiotics is carried out by academic research groups rather than by industry.
Big pharma are not evil, just misunderstood says senior big pharma employee. Don’t know about you but I’m convinced particularly by the last point “they will only do things that make money”. Somewhat contradicts the propaganda about vaccines being supplied at cost.