No balanced coverage of covid vaccines in legacy media, says Peter Doshi
Peter Doshi, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and senior editor at The BMJ, has spoken out about how the mainstream media has ignored important data on covid-19 vaccines.
In a recent interview with German TV, Doshi said, “Our legacy media has not done a good job in providing balanced coverage about the vaccines.”
He said there has been “a lot of nervousness” about how to communicate vaccine harms to people and is concerned that “we're not getting the information we need to make better choices and to have a more informed understanding of risk and benefit.”
Doshi’s concerns extended to the over-confidence of public health authorities engaged in promoting the covid-19 vaccines.
“It was very unfortunate, that from the beginning, what was presented to us by public health officials was a picture of great certainty…but the reality was that there were extremely important unknowns,” said Doshi who has written and spoken about these unknowns, highlighting that even public health officials were aware of these limitations.
“We entered a situation where essentially the stakes became too high to later present that uncertainty to people.” He added, “I think that's what set us off on the wrong foot. Public officials should have been a lot more forthright about the gaps in our knowledge.”
A pivotal study
Doshi was part of an international group of eminent academic researchers and physicians who went back and re-analysed the safety data from the original randomised clinical trials that underpinned the FDA’s decision to authorise the mRNA vaccines in December 2020.