The Lancet Publishes CDC Studies on Misinformation, Hoping You Forgot The Lancet and CDC Spread Pandemic Misinformation

Censorship academic Claire Wardle helps guide the journal’s descent into authoritarian, censorship hell.

Apr 25, 2024

Medical authorities and like-minded charlatans address public failure with several strategies. One method is to deny error, feign outrage at critics pointing to the screwup, and shroud yourself in the holy mantle of science. When caught lying about the science on masks and the possibility he funded a lab accident in Wuhan, Anthony Fauci famously deployed this strategy by first denying what he had said, and then striking back at his critics, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”

The second strategy science academics and kindred con artists deploy is to ignore their blunder, blunder onward while feigning expertise, and hope the public has the mental capacity of goldfish who forget their entire world every 15 minutes. After being humiliated several times for publishing COVID misinformation, The Lancet has landed on this second tactic, inverting reality to assert authority on misinformation—the very same topic they fucked up in the recent past.

But a few were not fooled. The Lancet’s announcement that they were publishing two papers warning about medical misinformation set off howls of laughter and merry disbelief on social media.

“You guys may want to sit this one out,” quipped conservative commentator, Tracy Beanz.

“Misinformation you say?” tweeted another, linking to news deriding a bogus study by a company called Surgisphere that the Lancet was forced to retract.

“By publishing falsehoods like the surgisphere fraud and the Lancet commission whitewash of lockdown failure and harms, the @Lancet was among the worst contributors to public misinformation during the covid era,” tweeted Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

We’ll get to the Lancet’s COVID face plants in a second, because what makes their ballyhooed studies on misinformation all the more comical is who authored them: CDC scientists and academic Claire Wardle.

“Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.” Anthony Fauci

To recount: the CDC drowned the public in a flood of misinformation during COVID, compelling Congress to drag the CDC Director out of the DC swamps, and frog march her up to the Hill for several public floggings. Meanwhile, Brown University’s Claire Wardle must be deluded enough to imagine people have forgotten that she rushed out a fact-addled vaccine report in the pandemic’s first year, claiming that worries about COVID vaccine mandates were nothing but a conspiracy theory.

After vaccine mandates were forced on the public, Wardle gloried in her role as professorial fraud, and doubled down on her prior falsehood to proclaim that criticism of vaccine mandates was now the conspiracy theory.

Dumber than a goldfish

Two of The Lancet’s major COVID blunders happened shortly after the pandemic set the world panicking. In February 2020, the journal published a statement signed by 27 experts who warned against the “conspiracy theory” that the virus could have come from a Wuhan lab. Emails later showed that this Lancet letter had been orchestrated by Peter Daszak, who runs a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, and who had failed to disclose that he was funding virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

After The Lancet declined to publish letters from academics asking the journal to reject “conspiracy theory” labels and open debate about the origin of the pandemic, several scientists charged that Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton was censoring research.

However, Peter Daszak’s hidden conflicts of interest and dishonesty over his ties to the Wuhan lab caused Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs to shut down the Lancet Commission’s task force that was looking into how the pandemic started.

When a member of Parliament then asked the Lancet’s Horton in December 2021 about Daszak’s misleading letter, Horton seemed to shrug off Daszak’s blatant dishonesty about his conflicts, testifying that it had surfaced a “debate” within the journal.

“It took us over year to persuade him to declare his full competing interests,” Horton said, implying that he was not in charge of setting ethics standards for his very own medical journal.

The Lancet also bellyflopped in the summer of 2020, when they fast tracked into publication a large study on the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 that suggested it increased the risk of death. The study relied on data supplied by Surgisphere, whose CEO later told Turkish TV, "With data like this, do we even need a randomized controlled trial?"

The Lancet later retracted the study after independent experts doubted that Surgisphere had ever collected the study’s data, and the company refused to allow an audit.

It's not that the analysis itself was done wrong," Dr. Daniel Culver, a pulmonary and critical care expert at the Cleveland Clinic told NBC News. "It's just they don't have the data in that database to account for what they need to account for."

Dr. Culver then leaned back and punched The Lancet right in the mouth, “A first-year statistics major could tell you about major flaws in the design of the analysis."

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CDC information experts?

In their public health journal, The Lancet published a policy paper by a plethora of CDC scientists to address “managing information ecosystems.” One information ecosystem these researchers should try managing is the CDC itself.

Two years into the pandemic, I discovered that the PR firm Weber Shandwick represented Pfizer and Moderna, while their employees were also embedded at the CDC group that implements the agency’s vaccine programs and oversees their recommendations for COVID vaccines.

“This new reporting that CDC had a contract with the same PR firm representing the manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccine raises serious concerns,” said a spokesperson for Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).

Some of this information I found by digging through the LinkedIn accounts of Pfizer employees embedded at the CDC.

I also reported that experts regularly criticized then-Director Rochelle Walensky for ignoring their advice to be more cautious on COVID vaccine promotion, and that she had a habit of overriding CDC decisions that didn’t recommend more boosters. In her final appearance before Congress, I noted that Dr. Walensky gave false testimony on masks, obliging congressional staff to correct the record to ensure the public trust in her agency.

“We want the record to reflect the accurate facts for posterity and take this responsibility very seriously,” a congressional staffer explained, when apprised of Dr. Walensky’s false statements to Congress. “Lack of trust in public health officials is becoming an enormous problem for many reasons.”

But current CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen has done nothing to fix her agency’s problem with spreading misinformation. During a congressional hearing last November on restoring trust in science, Dr. Cohen dodged questions and refused to explain if she would bring back mask mandates for toddlers.

A BMJ journal published a study a week later that found “mask recommendations for children are not supported by scientific evidence.”

And after CDC scientists posted a systematic review of the scientific literature last November that found N95 respirators perform no better than masks at stopping the spread of respiratory viruses, the CDC then warned their own researchers that they had gotten the science wrong.

Disinformation dimwits

Researchers in “disinformation” have little in common with academic scholars teaching Egyptian archaeology or studying applied mathematics. Disinformation researchers’ goal is not to engage with esoteric knowledge, but to provide a slight sprinkle of scholarly pixie dust to social media companies and agencies censoring unpopular opinions.

Enter Claire Wardle, a Brown University researcher collaborating on both Lancet papers with the CDC.

Digging through the Twitter Files, I discovered that Wardle emailed Twitter executives a report she had written in November 2020 looking into what she deemed to be antivaccine conspiracies and narratives found on social media.

“The research was conducted this summer by First Draft, amid growing concern that dangerous narratives and conspiracy theories may result in increasing vaccine skepticism,” reads Wardle’s email to Twitter.

One of the “conspiracy theories” that Wardle uncovered among American anti-vaccination networks were “individual liberty arguments” that “referenced the imposition of mask-wearing rules in public spaces to suggest the same will soon be applied to vaccine uptake.”

Despite Wardle’s claim that COVID vaccine mandates were a “conspiracy theory,” we now know that multiple companies, states, and federal agencies later implemented COVID vaccine mandates. Ignoring her own blunder, Wardle’s First Draft simply lurched forward to support vaccine mandates!—publishing blogs that labeled critiques of vaccine mandates as also “misinformation.”

I then tracked down some of the people who helped Wardle write this 2020 report that she forwarded to Twitter to help guide their censorship policies of alleged vaccine conspiracies. One of Wardle’s report authors later joined the global PR firm M&C Saatchi as an analyst. During a hearing last summer, an Australian official told Australian senators that M&C Saatchi helped them collect social media posts to censor that country’s citizens.

And a researcher who helped to put together Wardle’s report later joined the UK government as a “counter-disinformation product lead.” Last summer, a British official from that unit admitted that one of its main functions was “passing information over” to companies such as Facebook and Twitter to “encourage … the swift takedown” of posts criticizing government pandemic policies.

Wardle has done nothing to fix her faulty report, and failed to respond to questions I emailed to Brown University about her ties to censorship agencies.

Calling censorship “censorship”

Who is to blame for all this misinformation published by misinformation “experts” in journals that have been caught trafficking in misinformation? Perhaps we’re just passing through a brief moment in history that we will all look back upon one day and laugh. Or maybe we’re entering a political system that rewards risk takers and narcissists too blinded by elite credentials to recognize their own stupidity.

You read a lot of studies by misinformation researchers claiming to save lives with science—The Lancet is not alone in publishing these papers—and the New York Times stories about them are always positive. Con artists can be convincing. Misinformation experts continue living down to their published records as self-absorbed elites, who suppress dissent and launder personal opinions into a fake scientific consensus on controversial, contentious matters.

But if we persist as a goldfish culture that forgets they lied to us 15 minutes in the past, we deserve what we get, and should admit the obvious: we relish being silenced and conned.

The DisInformation Chronicle

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