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This article was nominated for deletion on 4 October 2018. The result of the discussion was keep. |
I haven't looked at this page for a while, but it's gotten pretty bad again. There are statements in the current version that I believe have come back after being removed that were originally introduced by a sock puppet.
In the discussion about the controversy, there is a single throw-away line about his tweets being criticized as inaccurate. Only one scientist (who happens to be supportive) is mentioned in the text, and it's his supervisor (so not a neutral party) who has no (or at least negligible) credentials in infectious disease. The fact that prominent scientists who are at the same institution as his supervisor who specialize in infectious diseases have publicly called Ding a "charlatan" is surely at least equally worthy of mention if not of more relevance.
The section on the "controversy over how to do science communication" being presented as a simply an argument over style is a red herring. The controversy is over whether making false or misleading statements is appropriate in science communication. The discussion about his lack of qualifications is also a distraction. People can lack official qualifications but still have gained the expertise to know what they are talking about. The problem is that his misrepresentation of basic concepts seems to stem from his lack of understanding, and then he uses his similar sounding expertise ("epidemiology") to get people to accept what he says. I know that when challenged he has made the statement that he never claimed to be an expert on infectious diseases, but frankly, that statement was dishonest. He has repeatedly claimed that he has relevant expertise. Joelmiller ( talk) 03:53, 18 October 2023 (UTC)
I don't have time/capacity to take this on - @ Crossroads are you able to bring in some of the sources you listed of scientists criticizing him as a source of misinformation?
I'm making a list of things that I believe need fixing Joelmiller ( talk) 12:17, 4 March 2022 (UTC) Since I had a glance at this page today and saw a lot of things that shocked me, here's a go at trying to document some of them for others to think about: @ GlobeGores @ Shibbolethink @ Yug
I maintain that if you can read the criticism section and you do not get the impression that at least some experts on infectious disease believe he frequently mis-states facts then you are missing the primary criticisms.
Less clear to me: I don't see a purpose for the section "A case study of social web early alert" - is this worth keeping, especially if we aren't including mention of his inaccurate claims? That'll do for me for a while - I've got lots of teaching this semester. Good luck. Joelmiller ( talk) 12:17, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
But as Feigl-Ding’s influence has grown, so have the voices of his critics, many of them fellow scientists who have expressed ongoing concern over his tweets, which they say are often unnecessarily alarmist, misleading, or sometimes just plain wrong. “Science misinformation is a huge problem right now — I think we can all appreciate it — [and] he’s a constant source of it,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University and the University of Arizona who serves on FAS’ Covid-19 Rapid Response Taskforce, a separate arm of the organization from Feigl-Ding’s work. Tara Smith, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Kent State University, suggested that Feigl-Ding’s reach means his tweets have the power to be hugely influential. “With as large of a following as he has, when he says something that’s really wrong or misleading, it reverberates throughout the Twittersphere,” she said. Critics point to numerous problems....To Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, this represents a pattern. “[T]his is his MO,” she wrote in an email. “He tweets something sensational and out of context, buries any caveats further down-thread, and watches the clicks and [retweets] roll in.”...And on any given day, it’s easy to find other experts picking apart a Feigl-Ding tweet, explaining what he’s gotten wrong, or what nuance he’s left out....Finding experts publicly correcting or critiquing Feigl-Ding’s tweets is not hard.[1], Undark Magazine, 11-25-2020.
But along the way he has garnered harsh criticism from some fellow epidemiologists for opining about issues on which, they say, he knows very little. “Everyone is very frustrated with him and regretting that we didn’t band together to discredit him,” said one epidemiologist. Another called him a “guy with zero background” in infectious-disease research who is “spouting a bunch of half-truths.”...But one of the nation’s most prominent infectious-disease researchers, Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard and director of the university’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, has made no secret of his disdain for Feigl-Ding’s virus-related commentary, repeatedly calling him out as an unqualified publicity-seeker.[2], The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4-17-2020.
Feigl-Ding’s followers rapidly grew, from around 2,000 to now more than 109,000, as they voraciously consumed Feigl-Ding’s often misleading, inaccurate or exaggerated tweets. Soon Feigl-Ding was on CNN, identified as “Public Health Expert, Harvard University,” and on CGTN as a “scientist” at Harvard. Colleagues and other experts on Twitter who tried to correct Feigl-Ding were attacked, dismissed, blocked or ignored. Feigl-Ding is a public health expert, no doubt, and he is a visiting scientist at Harvard. But that doesn’t mean he’s remotely qualified to speak on an infectious disease outbreak. Relying on someone who appears authoritative but isn’t actually an expert in the topic is dangerous, as you risk communicating inaccurate or misleading information to an anxious public.[3], Association of Health Care Journalists, 3-11-2020.
In early 2020, for example, he took on Eric Feigl-Ding, a nutritional epidemiologist then at Harvard Chan who amassed a huge following with what many scientists felt were alarmist tweets. When Feigl-Ding tweeted about a preprint claiming that SARS-CoV-2 contained sequences from HIV and was likely engineered, Bergstrom called him an “alarmist attention-seeker.” (The preprint was withdrawn within days.) But the spat showed that defining misinformation is difficult. Feigl-Ding rang the alarm many times—he is “very, very concerned” about every new variant, Bergstrom says, and “will tweet about how it’s gonna come kill us all”—but turned out to be right on some things. “It’s misinformation if you present these things as certainties and don’t adequately reflect the degree of uncertainty that we have,” Bergstrom says.[4], Science, 3-23-2022
The above sources, except for Science, and also including this from Times Higher Education, also comment extensively on the matter of the debate over his qualifications. Crossroads -talk- 04:22, 14 April 2022 (UTC)
The JAMA paper on Cox-2 inhibitor drugs shows that the kidney risks were evident by year 2000, according to figure 2 of the JAMA paper. The time-cumulative meta-analysis analysis shows it. this is mention in the discussion and results of the paper too, so its peer reviewed, not conjecture. 75.104.106.110 ( talk) — Preceding undated comment added 19:19, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
I think its also important to highlight this Georgia Straight article that notably says EFD's twitter feed is a 'goto destination' for pandemic info. Georgia Straight's editor Charlie Smith says, "Feigl-Ding also alerted me to a massive NIH-funded study showing that U.S. school districts with mandatory mask policies had 72 percent fewer in-school COVID-19 transmissions than districts without mandatory mask policies. This isn't something that Health Minister Adrian Dix ever mentions when defending the lifting of a provincewide indoor mask mandate. Nor is this research disclosed on the websites of the B.C. Centre for Disease Control and B.C.'s health authorities." [1]. Sahiljain22 ( talk)
References
This section, which already has an unencyclopedic, non-wiki complaint title for a BLP, has at least five statements that require attribution but that have none, and has at least one sweeping medical claim that does not have a MEDRS-compliant citation.
I propose that this section be dealt with by (A) deleting it; (B) moving it here to the talkpage until it is cleaned up and fixed; or (C) attributing everything that needs it and removing all medical/epidemiological claims not cited to a MEDRS source.
If the section is kept in any form, it needs a heading that works for a Wikipedia BLP (and that does not instead sound like the title to someone's term paper). Softlavender ( talk) 07:51, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
The subsection titled Coronavirus preparedness advocacy repeats itself word for word. Does anyone object to removing the repetition? Skywriter ( talk) 18:36, 26 November 2022 (UTC)