Paul D. Thacker is an American journalist who reports on science, medicine, and the environment. [1] [2] He was a lead investigator of the United States Senate Committee on Finance for Senator Chuck Grassley, where he examined financial links between physicians and pharmaceutical companies. [3]
Thacker was raised in California and Texas, and joined the US Army after high school, where he was deployed in Saudi Arabia and Iraq during the Gulf War. [4] [5] He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology, with an emphasis in ecology and evolution, from the University of California, Davis in 1997. [6] [4] He worked as a laboratory technician at Emory University before turning to journalism, leaving Emory for an Audubon magazine internship in 2000. [4]
After 2000, Thacker wrote for publications such as The New Republic and Salon and was a staff writer with Environmental Science & Technology , a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Here he published a series of exposés that a senior ACS official claimed showed an anti-industry bias, culminating in an article on the Weinberg Group that resulted in him being fired by the journal in 2006. [4] [7] [8] In Thacker's Weinberg Group story he wrote about a letter that group sent to DuPont outlining a plan to protect DuPont from litigation and regulation over Teflon. [9] The Weinberg Group had done similar work for Big Tobacco and then began working in Europe to defeat alcohol regulations. [10] [ specify ] ACS editor Rudy Baum called the Weinberg article a "hatchet job". [11] [8] In 2006, the Weinberg article won a second place prize in annual awards presented by the US Society of Environmental Journalists. [12] Later that year, Thacker's work was profiled on Exposé: America's Investigative Reports. [13]
In 2007, Thacker joined the United States Senate Committee on Finance for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, investigating medical research conflicts of interest. [4] [14] Among his work he identified several physicians who had failed to disclose payments from drug and medical companies, including psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff. [15] He also led the committee's investigation of the drug Avandia, [16] which included a report that a medical journal had published a ghostwritten article promoting the drug. [5] He left the committee in 2010 to join the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog organization. [15] [5] [17]
From 2012 to 2014, Thacker completed two fellowships at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics. [18]
In November 2021, The BMJ published a piece by Thacker alleging there has been "poor practice" at Ventavia, one of the companies involved in the phase III evaluation trials of the Pfizer vaccine. [19] The report was enthusiastically embraced by anti-vaccination activists. Questioning Thacker's work in Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski wrote that his article presented facts without necessary context to misleading effect, playing up the seriousness of the noted problems. [20] Some experts have expressed skepticism over the allegations made in the report. Prominent vaccination expert Paul Offit has criticized the issues outlined in the report as being vague and has cautioned against assuming the claims made in it are true. [21] The Association of British Science Writers chose the article as a finalist for the Steve Connor Award for Investigative Science Journalism. [22]
Thacker received the 2021 British Journalism Award for Specialist Journalism for a series of articles in The BMJ investigating undisclosed financial interests among medical experts advising the US and UK governments on vaccines. The award judges said “[t]his was expertly researched and written journalism on a subject of huge national importance.” [23] [24]
In a 2023 article in Politico about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s history of endorsing conspiracy theories, Thacker is described as an "anti-vaccine reporter." [25] The American chapter of the British charity Sense about Science, which promotes public awareness of science, noted Thacker's collaboration with anti-vaccine activists. [26]
A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported
Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, racial injustice, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Practitioners sometimes use the terms "watchdog reporting" or "accountability reporting".
The BMJ is a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal, published by BMJ Group, which in turn is wholly-owned by the British Medical Association (BMA). The BMJ has editorial freedom from the BMA. It is one of the world's oldest general medical journals. Previously called the British Medical Journal, the title was officially shortened to BMJ in 1988, and then changed to The BMJ in 2014. The journal is published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, a subsidiary of the British Medical Association (BMA). The current editor-in-chief of The BMJ is Kamran Abbasi, who was appointed in January 2022.
In academic publishing, a retraction is a mechanism by which a published paper in an academic journal is flagged for being seriously flawed to the extent that their results and conclusions can no longer be relied upon. Retracted articles are not removed from the published literature but marked as retracted. In some cases it may be necessary to remove an article from publication, such as when the article is clearly defamatory, violates personal privacy, is the subject of a court order, or might pose a serious health risk to the general public.
Brian Deer is a British investigative journalist, best known for inquiries into the drug industry, medicine, and social issues for The Sunday Times. Deer's investigative nonfiction book The Doctor Who Fooled the World, an exposé on disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield and the 1998 Lancet MMR autism fraud, was published in September 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ben Michael Goldacre is a British physician, academic and science writer. He is the first Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford. He is a founder of the AllTrials campaign and OpenTrials, aiming to require open science practices in clinical trials.
False balance, known colloquially as bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a cause of misinformation.
Jane Symons is an Australian media consultant, journalist and author based in London. She has written for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, and she is a vice chair of the Medical Journalists' Association and the public-patient information lead for the Covidence-UK longitudinal study. Her book, How to Have a Baby and Still Live in the Real World, has been published in countries including the UK, USA and Russia.
Jennifer Ann McCarthy-Wahlberg is an American actress, model, and television personality. She began her career in 1993 as a nude model for Playboy magazine and was later named their Playmate of the Year. McCarthy then had a television and film acting career, beginning as a co-host on the MTV game show Singled Out (1995–1997) and afterwards starring in the eponymous sitcom Jenny (1997–1998), as well as films including BASEketball (1998), Scream 3 (2000), Dirty Love (2005), John Tucker Must Die (2006), and Santa Baby (2006). In 2013, she hosted her own television talk show The Jenny McCarthy Show, and became a co-host of the ABC talk show The View, appearing on the program until 2014. Since 2019, McCarthy has been a judge on the Fox musical competition show The Masked Singer.
Claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism have been extensively investigated and found to be false. The link was first suggested in the early 1990s and came to public notice largely as a result of the 1998 Lancet MMR autism fraud, characterised as "perhaps the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years". The fraudulent research paper, authored by Andrew Wakefield and published in The Lancet, falsely claimed the vaccine was linked to colitis and autism spectrum disorders. The paper was retracted in 2010 but is still cited by anti-vaccine activists.
Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is a British fraudster, discredited academic, anti-vaccine activist, and former physician.
Sir John Irving Bell is a Canadian-British immunologist and geneticist. From 2006 to 2011, he was President of the United Kingdom's Academy of Medical Sciences, and since 2002 he has held the Regius Chair of Medicine at the University of Oxford. He was since 2006 Chairman of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research (OSCHR) but in 2020 became a normal member. Bell was selected to the Vaccine Taskforce sometime before 1 July 2020. Bell is also on the board of directors of the SOE quango Genomics England.
Sir Andrew Paul Haines, FMedSci is a British epidemiologist and academic. He was the Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine from 2001 to 2010.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) or autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) describe a range of conditions classified as neurodevelopmental disorders in the DSM-5, used by the American Psychiatric Association. As with many neurodivergent people and conditions, the popular image of autistic people and autism itself is often based on inaccurate media representations. Additionally, media about autism may promote pseudoscience such as vaccine denial or facilitated communication.
Stewart Ranken Douglas FRS was a British pathologist, bacteriologist and immunologist.
Nina Teicholz is an American journalist who advocates for the consumption of saturated fat, dairy products and meat. Her works include the 2014 book The Big Fat Surprise. She is the head of the Nutrition Coalition, a dietary advocacy group. Teicholz's work has been supported and financed by John D. Arnold and his Arnold Ventures group. Teicholz's views and assertions regarding the consumption of saturated fat and meat have been contested by scientists.
The Lancet MMR autism fraud centered on the publication in February 1998 of a fraudulent research paper titled "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children" in The Lancet. The paper, authored by now discredited and deregistered Andrew Wakefield, and twelve coauthors, falsely claimed causative links between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and colitis and between colitis and autism. The fraud involved data selection, data manipulation, and two undisclosed conflicts of interest. It was exposed in a lengthy Sunday Times investigation by reporter Brian Deer, resulting in the paper's retraction in February 2010 and Wakefield being struck off the UK medical register three months later. Wakefield reportedly stood to earn up to US$43 million per year selling diagnostic kits for a non-existent syndrome he claimed to have discovered. He also held a patent to a rival vaccine at the time, and he had been employed by a lawyer representing parents in lawsuits against vaccine producers.
Extensive investigation into vaccines and autism spectrum disorder has shown that there is no relationship between the two, causal or otherwise, and that vaccine ingredients do not cause autism. The American scientist Peter Hotez researched the growth of the false claim and concluded that its spread originated with Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 paper, and that no prior paper supports a link.
Helen Branswell is a Canadian infectious diseases and global health reporter at Stat News. Branswell spent fifteen years as a medical reporter at The Canadian Press, where she led coverage of the Ebola, Zika, SARS and swine flu pandemics. She joined Stat News at its founding 2015, leading the website's coverage of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Wei Shen Lim is a consultant respiratory physician and honorary professor of medicine at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, England.
Shabir Ahmed Madhi, is a South African physician who is professor of vaccinology and director of the South African Medical Research Council Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, and National Research Foundation/Department of Science and Technology Research Chair in Vaccine Preventable Diseases. In January 2021, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand.