Last month popular commentator Leana Wen, MD cancelled her appearance at the American Public Health…
WND
‘Certainty expressed by some experts is better described as hubris than fact’
By Joseph Fraiman & Robert Kaplan
Real Clear Wire
Last month popular commentator Leana Wen, MD cancelled her appearance at the American Public Health Association because of credible death threats. Hundreds signed a petition challenging her suggestion that COVID-19 restrictions can be loosened. Ironically, only a year earlier she received death threats for promoting stricter restrictions and vaccine mandates. Wen bases her public commentary on her best interpretation of the latest scientific evidence. As a physician and public health scientist, that’s how she was trained. Yet Wen’s accommodation to emerging research provoked both the extreme political right and left. How did a respected physician/scientist’s best interpretation of scientific data degenerate into the potential for physical violence? The causes of this overwhelming antagonism are certainly multifactorial. But, surprisingly, fact checkers may be major contributors. Their sometimes-capriciously assigned misinformation labels can result in social media censorship and threaten academic freedom.
In journalism some verifiable facts can be reliably checked. The claim that a political candidate holds a degree from a prestigious university can be verified against institutional records. But in medical science, fact checkers cannot reliably determine what is or isn’t “true” because clinical medicine rarely produces unassailable “facts”. Under the best of circumstances, multiple clinical trials are used to establish the risks and benefits of an intervention. Study methods vary and it is rare when all studies lead to the same conclusion. Medical science’s most enduring fact is that a continuous flow of new studies will challenge previously accepted wisdom. The goal of identifying the best medical interventions is achieved through acknowledging uncertainty, inspection of evidence, and open debate. By implying there is a known “truth”, fact checkers provoke hostility toward those who challenge dogma or recognize uncertainty.
Expert opinion, or even a consensus of medical experts are not facts, yet fact checkers often accept opinions as truth. Consider the track record of experts over the last 300 years or even the last twenty. Previous consensus among medical experts was usually wrong. Fact checking would have hastily applied the misinformation label to those who correctly challenged the safety of Vioxx or OxyContin. David Sackett, the father of evidence-based medicine, famously said, “half of what you’ll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the trouble is that nobody can tell you which half”.
