How Misinformation Cost the Mail £6 Million

I don’t like the word ‘misinformation’. Something is either true or not true. Here’s three recent incidents – from the BBC, The Telegraph and the Daily Mail – that shed light on the troubled waters of misinformation.

Last week the BBC claimed that guests of the podcaster Stephen Bartlett were spreading harmful health ‘misinformation’. No actual statement as to what the ‘misinformation’ was or who had been harmed were laid out in their badly researched hatchet piece. One of his accused guests was the brilliant and never outspoken professor of biology, Thomas Seyfreid, whom I have also interviewed regarding cancer as a metabolic disease, driven by sugar.

Next, in the Telegraph this weekend was the most outrageous and inaccurate piece headed ‘Alzheimer’s drugs should be prescribed like statins’ claiming, falsely, that the ‘amyloid cascade hypothesis’ was proven due to the ‘fact’ of the benefit of the new anti-amyloid drugs. The reality is that, despite lowering brain levels of amyloid, the drugs have all failed to produce a clinically significant benefit,  but have harmed about a quarter of those in trials, with brain bleeding or swelling, and killed a few as a consequence. This is more proof that the amyloid theory is defunct. What’s more amyloid deposits occur in people who don’t develop Alzheimer’s and are not present in some diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

The analogy with statins is a poignantly bad example as the Daily Mail are forced to cough up close to £6 million for falsely accusing a doctor and a nutritionist of potentially harming people by being ‘statin deniers’. The basis for the Mail’s claim was that they had written articles that made ‘knowingly false statements’ about the effectiveness of the cholesterol-lowering drugs statins and stressed the risks of the dangerous side-effects much like I am doing right now for the Amyloid Alzheimer’s drugs.

With very little publicity, a defamation trial against the Mail on Sunday has just ended with a comprehensive victory for the two plaintiffs – Malcolm Kendrick GP and nutritionist Dr Zoe Harcombe. “It’s a case that throws revealing and alarming light on the unscientific and brutal way some senior figures in the medical profession deal with criticism. A key reason why the newspaper lost, was because it took very little notice of what is needed to defend yourself against a defamation claim.” Says Jerome Burne, award-winning medical journalist. His blog at https://healthinsightuk.org/ gives the full story. The Daily Mail has apologised in print.

In the case against the Mail examined the actual evidence and the judge concluded that the evidence just doesn’t stack up for statins. The ‘misinformation’ turned out to be true.

Unlike in the BBC’s kangaroo court, where some researcher decides that a view (based on science) that sugar feeds cancer cells and ketogenic diets help weaken them is ‘misinformation’; or the Telegraph’s completely one sided article which provides no counterbalance at all in the fictional account of the failed anti-amyloid drugs that the NHS has rightly been told not to prescribe because they are dangerous, don’t work anywhere near well enough and are simply not worth the exorbitant cost and risk. Are journalists getting sloppy or is it the piper playing the tune? What do you think?