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Preaching Ignorance and Fear
It’s flu season and that means a major offensive by pharma to convince parents to vaccinate themselves and their children. Never mind the last flu vaccine fiasco still sits like a last week's trash waiting to be taken to the dumpster.
The coordinated attempt and success for pharma to manipulate the press seems boundless. Yesterday, CNN reported on “Matthew.” Matthew Lacek’s parents decided not to vaccinate and Matthew got a Hib infection (Haemophilus Influenza type B).
Today, Nancy Snyderman, NBC’s chief medical editor spent almost 6 minutes urging children and adults to get their vaccine and booster shots.
Both were full-frontal position pieces extolling the virtues of vaccines with little or no regard to the very real dangers vaccines pose. Not one word the Hib vaccine is associated with diabetes or a 120% increase in non-type b Haemophilus influenza.
Matthew’s Hib infection occurred in 2006. Couldn’t CNN find a more timely story? Was it news or a hit piece about parents that don’t vaccinate?
Nancy Snyderman speaks with absolute authority on the safety of all vaccines. A paragon of virtue who was forced to return $50,000 to DrKoop.com after violating insider trading rules. Maybe not so much.
Against the backdrop of ads masquerading as news is the excellence of HealthNewsReview.org that has developed 10 criteria for media to follow when reporting on health care issues. It also provides a great roadmap for consumers.
Ten criteria for how the media should report on new health care ideas or new claims for old health care ideas are examined.
Gary Schwitzer
What, if any, are the criteria journalists use when reporting on new ideas in health care or on new claims for old ideas?
For the past year, a team of people with backgrounds in journalism, medicine, public health and health services research have applied 10 criteria to evaluate and grade health news stories reported in the U.S. that include claims of efficacy or safety. By applying these 10 criteria [1], we put a stake in the ground, making the case that these standards should be applied to all such health care stories.
There are almost 300 such stories that have passed through the vetting process and are now posted on HealthNewsReview.org. Three independent reviewers also evaluate each story to ensure that all of the criteria are met.
The criteria remind journalists, when reporting on treatments or tests, to:
- discuss costs.
- describe the potential benefits and harms.
- use absolute (not just relative) risk/benefit data.
- compare the new product or procedure with existing alternatives.
- seek out independent sources who have no conflict of interest.
- look beyond the news release.
- avoid disease-mongering—exaggerating or medicalizing conditions.
- explain to their audience that not all studies are equal.
- distinguish between what product or procedure is a new idea and what is just new wrapping on an old one.
- provide information about the availability of the product or procedure.
Our early experience shows some troubling trends. For example, when a study on using CT scans to screen smokers for lung cancer was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 2006 [2], journalists responded.
HealthNewsReview.org reviewed eight stories on that study.
- 6 of the 8 stories failed to adequately discuss potential harms of such screening, which can include radiation exposure, needless anxiety engendered by a false-positive result and medical complications associated with follow-up biopsies.
- 6 of the 8 stories failed to adequately address the availability of CT scan machines that are capable of performing the lung cancer screening described.
- 4 of 8 stories failed to discuss the costs of the screening, which were talked about in the original New England Journal of Medicine article. Estimates for the cost of the tests range from $200 to $1,000 per scan, making this a significant consideration that half the stories ignored.
- 5 of 8 stories relied on a single source—usually only on the authors of the published study—and failed to present balanced, independent perspectives.
Read the entire piece here.
