Summary: The BMJ published an article exposing questionable practices by a company involved with the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial. Readers reported problems sharing the article, which proved to be due to a Facebook “fact check”. The BMJ is not amused.
For a different (and in my opinion, much more accurate) perspective on what’s got the BMJ in a dither, read this:
The upshot is that the BMJ got a hack “investigative journalist” to write a piece that was long on insinuation and way short on convincing evidence, creating a false impression that Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine was approved on the basis of inadequate and even fraudulent clinical trials. That’s not something a major medical journal should be doing in the middle of a pandemic.
I got the impression that the BMJ’s outgoing and incoming editors, who authored the “blast” at Facebook, were especially outraged that anyone could question a piece appearing in such a “high level” and “high quality” publication as the BMJ (a bit full of ourselves, aren’t we) and refer to the BMJ website’s news update section as a “blog”. Heaven forfend.