The so-called fact checking is often presented as if it were a neutral and impartial activity, conducted by experienced people with the aim of improving the quality of information circulating on the net.
Pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer have over time financed fact-checking projects, which coincidentally had led to the blackout of content that cast a shadow on Pfizer's products.
In this way, the fact checkers would be nothing more than an external marketing department of the Big Pharma company, which in this way cleans up the network of negative advertising for its product. However, Pfizer is not alone in this round of money and sliding doors.
Take, for example, another organization of factcheckers, FactCheck.org.
We define ourselves as consumer advocates, non-partisan and nonprofit for voters who intend to reduce the level of deception and confusion in US politics.
This is the presentation that the organization itself, which collaborates, among others, with social network platforms, such as Facebook.
In practice, FactCheck.org employees analyze posts on Facebook and report them to the platform if deemed fake. Facebook thus proceeds to obscure the content. Well, FactCheck.org, which defines itself as independent, is actually not independent because it is funded by stakeholders.
The same organization has in fact recently launched a project aimed at disinformation related to vaccines against Covid which was made possible with the funds made available by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And who was this Robert Wood Johnson? None other than the president of Johnson & Johnson, a pharmaceutical company engaged in the production and sale of anti Covid vaccines. Also, to date, approximately 15% of this foundation's assets are invested in Johnson & Johnson stock.
It does not end there, because the current President and CEO of this foundation is Richard Besser, who worked for almost twenty years in the American Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that deals with public health. Thus the circle of conflict of interest is closed: from the Johnson & Johnson company, passing through fact checkers, to public health institutions.
FactCheck.org attempted to justify this proximity to Big Pharma in a few words:
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as is the case with all of our sponsors, has no control over our editorial content.
With all the good will these two lines do not reassure us at all about the alleged impartiality of FactCheck.org.
If they were truly independent, why take money from a foundation closely linked to a pharmaceutical company producing anti Covid vaccines? The same ones that fact checkers seem to defend with so much commitment, every time they obscure a content, even if published by an authoritative scientific journal such as the British Medical Journal. As long as there is even a minimal mix of interests with Big Pharma, the credibility of fact checkers must be considered close to zero.
References:
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/04/scicheck-and-our-committment-to-transparency/
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95
