I Debunked a Covid-19 Conspiracy Video

 
 
Yesterday, I wrote a Facebook post debunking a Covid-19 conspiracy video that had been making the rounds all day in right-wing circles. All the leading platforms have since removed the video and its offshoots for the rampant misinformation it contained, but not before it garnered some 14 million views on Facebook alone. The video, a staged presser of sorts by a dozen doctors in lab coats, was apparently one of the most viral pieces of content in the entire history of the platform. According to NYT columnist Kevin Roose:
 

“The #2 most-engaged post on Facebook today is a Breitbart video of a group of doctors claiming that hydroxychloroquine is “a cure for Covid” and “you don’t need a mask.” 14 million views in 6 hours. (For scale, Plandemic got ~8 million in a few days.)”

 
In the following post, which appears to have gone semi-viral since I logged off last night, I go through a few of the red flags I picked up on while watching the video. It’s hardly worth tracking down and watching for yourself (one of the doctors blanked on what the ‘H’ in NIH stands for), but I’m sure you could find it if you really wanted to. I hope my teardown below will be useful for sharing with friends and family who may have been conned by the video, or with any others in your circles who’ve shared it with glee.

For more background, here’s a quick and dirty summary from Business Insider.

And for a cataloged list of peer reviewed studies debunking the ‘HCQ as prophylactic and cure’ narrative, see this thread.

No doubt people will, as is customary, treat the video’s removal as evidence its claims have merit. But it does seem significantly worse to allow misinfo like this to spread around unchecked versus people having to specifically seek it out in uncommon places.

 

So there’s a video1  that made the rounds today of a group of 12 or so doctors giving a press conference outside the Supreme Court arguing that hydroxychloroquine (hereafter, HCQ) is both a “prophylactic” and a “cure” for Covid-19 and that the truth about the efficacy of this drug is being hidden from the public.

This ragtag coterie was assembled by an organization known as America’s Frontline Doctors. If you haven’t heard of them before, it’s because they’re not a real organization. Their domain name was registered on July 16th of this year. As far as can be discerned, they’re a fringe far-right front group whose raison d’etre is to downplay the gravity of the pandemic and cast doubt on established science. At present, the video, originally posted by Breitbart, is primarily being circulated in right-wing bubbles, after signal boosts by a variety of alt-right, Tea Party-aligned pages and websites.

One thing I noticed right off the bat is there’s zero real press presence. It almost seems like a handful of people just stepped off a tour bus somewhere. The guy working the camera conspicuously avoids showing the crowd as much as possible. There are literally like six people there. If this feels odd, it’s because it is. Were this a legitimate press conference meant to convey sound science to the general public, you’d want as much press there as possible to disseminate the information as widely as possible.

But this isn’t what’s happening. What’s going on here is actually a hallmark tactic of the far-right in that they bring in a small number of handpicked press outlets and journos whom they know will be sympathetic to the views and info being espoused. This limits the pushback during the actual press conference: they know what they’re advocating can’t stand up to real scrutiny, and they don’t want any of that scrutiny or informed skepticism to be seen on camera.

As for the content, it’s all the standard Covid conspiracy fare you can probably already imagine. When one of the first doctors to speak couldn’t remember what the ‘H’ in NIH stands for (not a joke), I had to shut it off. I picked it back up later only so I could finish this post (not sure it was worth it but here we are). There’s also a woman (Stella Immanuel) shouting about and repeatedly disparaging double-blind studies as “fake science.” Apparently, Real Science™ is her single sample of patients from her single clinic in Texas. I googled her clinic and it currently has one review, and another one on Facebook. Alas, you would think at least a few of the people “cured” by HCQ would have left a review for her.

Several of the doctors here touting the pseudo-magical properties of HCQ have perhaps mixed up correlation with causation — and bias with rigorous research, more likely. How, for example, do they know that their patients who recovered from Covid-19 did so because of HCQ, as opposed to natural recovery as their immune system fought off the virus? Was there a control group to help isolate the effects of HCQ? How were they able to discount, measure, or compare the effects of other treatments that may have been administered alongside HCQ? This, it must be said, is the *whole point* of randomized controlled trials in the first place — to rule out faulty causal inferences. It’s very tiring indeed to have to go through this with people who should know better.

Which brings us to my next point, which is that physicians, generally speaking, are not scientists. In many cases, they’re not even all that well-trained in science apart from memorizing a highly specific set of facts. They don’t necessarily have a robust understanding of the scientific process or experimental design. This isn’t their fault, of course; it’s not a routine expectation in their profession. At any rate, placing greater emphasis on the rote observations of a doctor than the many tightly controlled trials conducted to date is a mistake.

It should go without saying that a staged press conference is not exactly how the frontier of science and empirical knowledge are advanced. Science advances from fierce debate resolved through the process of peer review. It’s not as glamorous as shiny white coats with megaphones standing outside Congress, admittedly, but it’s the best method we have for shoring up knowledge about the natural world. Many of the assertions made by today’s group of ‘America’s Frontline Doctors’ have been disproved in objective, controlled studies, no matter how many right-wing quacks you get to stand in front of a camera and protest to the contrary.

The last red flag I want to call attention to has to do with the language that so often accompanies these kinds of clickbaity videos. The directive to “watch quick before they take it down again” is a dead giveaway that you’re being fed an enormous dose of sh*t. Always and instinctively avoid videos that promise you “inside information” that’s being “hidden” from you. They’re designed to short-circuit your critical thinking faculties and emotionally manipulate you while doing so. Remember, this is the far-right’s calling card: conscripting fringe voices, however far outside mainstream academia, to release generic ‘reports’ masquerading as good science. They’ve been doing it for years, it’s just easier to spot in real time now.

Feel free to share this with people who need it. I did the homework so you don’t have to.

 

Addendum

One residual question many have been asking is how a thoroughly suspect video like this could receive such massive traffic. The honest answer, I think, is that it catered to a specific set of ideological axioms, namely that Covid-19 is essentially a hoax or otherwise overhyped, and that the truth — from the case numbers to the efficacy of masks to the available remedies — is being shielded from the public at large. Vast numbers on the right buy into this narrative hook, line, and sinker, so when seemingly credentialed folks sporting shiny coats were on their computer screen saying exactly this, they were keyed in. It’s confirmation bias on a national scale. The other reason is that we are in the midst of a pandemic and people are desperate to latch onto anything, no matter how flimsy the evidence.

Secondly, inquiring after the motivations or mental state of the individuals appearing at the press conference may keep some online quarters busy, but it’s irrelevant as regards the underlying science. We don’t need to label Dr. Stella Immanuel ‘crazy’, for example, in order to demonstrate that she has no actual data for her claims and that her work at her tiny clinic in Houston is not on a par with RCTs — the gold standard in medical science. I think it’s perfectly possible that some of the folks in the video are well-intentioned and believe they’re doing the right thing, but simply misunderstand the scientific process or the nuances of controlled trials. Alternatively, a few may indeed be bad faith actors out to make a buck. But what matters is the data, and it’s not on their side.

Lastly, it is not overly difficult to fact-check wild and grandiose claims like this or to vet science-centric information more generally. Granted, the task has certainly become more onerous in the era of misinformation and troll farms, but peer reviewed research is still the gold standard; that hasn’t changed. If a friend or loved one chooses to invest their trust in random YouTube videos and blogs over published research, yes, that’s a problem and they are liable to arrive at faulty conclusions. But sound science is still easy to find, access, and interpret provided you’re looking in the right places and investing trust in authorities with actual expertise.

 

Further reading and resources:

Feature image credit: John Phillips / Getty Images

  1. No, I won’t share it here, frankly because it’s not worth sharing and I won’t be responsible for giving it traffic it doesn’t deserve. [↩]
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