BBC platforms anti-vaccine scaremonger
PLATFORMING FRINGE SCIENTISTS IS BAD JOURNALISM
The BBC came under fire for letting anti-vaccine conspiracies hijack a news broadcast last week. The corporation invited Aseem Malhotra, a fringe scientist, onto the program. He made an unevidenced claim that Covid vaccines were causing excess deaths from coronary artery disease. “If you’ll allow me to say this, what my own research has found, is that the Covid MRNA vaccines do carry a cardiovascular risk,” he said. Malhotra’s views are extreme: he has retweeted claims comparing the vaccine to the Holocaust. And based on his “own research,” he made the claims about cardiovascular risk.
“We did it. We broke mainstream broadcast media ????????????,” Malhotra tweeted after the interview aired. Anti-vaccine activists celebrated, too. “Just WOW!...on BBC, the belly of the beast,” wrote a YouTube commenter. Russell Brand, the entertainer turned health guru turned conspiracy theorist, also celebrated the fact that Malholtra had bagged a slot on the channel.
Nigel Farage retweeted the clip. I first spotted Farage’s anti-vaccine dog whistling back in 2020, when he told me in an interview that he was “skeptical” of the vaccine. “There’s a little bit of me that says, ‘Oh go on, Bill [Gates], you have it first,’” he told me at the time.
Not so long ago, I was invited to speak on U.K. radio about “the Covid vaccine debate.” The broadcaster wanted me to debate a known, prominent anti-vaccine activist. After a bit of thought, I declined. Booking that radical anti-vaccine voice and giving them airtime, I told the producer, wasn’t about objectivity and balance. It wasn’t responsible journalism. And it wasn’t reflective of actual scientific conversations around vaccines. It’s false balance, skewing people’s perceptions of science, convincing them that being anti-vaccine is a legitimate academic position, and an equal and opposite view to supporting vaccines. In reality, the anti-vaccine movement is grounded in for-profit charlatanism, conspiracy theories, magical thinking and a total rejection of science and logic — and it’s also represented by an extreme margin of fringe conspiracy groups. While I do think we should talk about and confront anti-vaccine activism, it’s not “balance” to let an anti-vaccine voice on air every time we discuss vaccine rollouts.