I stumbled across the Better Skeptics “Ground Truth Challenge” which offered prize money for identifying false statements in this and three other related podcasts, judged by three referees including our own ciphergoth.
This site puts the burden of proof on critics to prove that statements by the anti-vax leaders are false. I think this is problematic because most of the claims coming out of the mouths of Weinstein, Kirsch, etc. are...
unfalsifiable claims (e.g. “the [VAERS] reports were put in by people and [snaps fingers] they disappeared”)
speculation (“vaccinating into a pandemic rather than in advance of a pandemic, is liable to cause the evolution of escaped mutants, and that it could...make a much worse pandemic in the end”*)
vague motte-and-baily type claims (e.g. “the spike protein is dangerous”), whose goalpost is unclear so that whether the claim is falsified is very much in the eye of the beholder.
difficult or impossible to prove false on a budget less than the reward amount of $100, especially as lots of the claims do not identify any source they are based on.
Also, the fact that 123 out of the 126 submissions were unsuccessful suggests that the judges were very strict in their judgements.
I can’t tell what reasoning they used to reject 123 of the entries; most of the links away from the result page are dead links that just say “File is in owner’s trash”.
Edit: in fact there is a category called “Unsupported claim” which seems to have a lower burden of proof (reward: $50); still, somehow 98% of submissions were unsuccessful. Also, the official rules limit submissions to four specific podcast episodes; they don’t accept challenges to source material such as Steve’s blog, and I didn’t initially realize this so I did challenge Steve’s blog here.
But let’s consider, for example, Steve’s claim that “these vaccines have likely killed over 25,800 Americans”, which links to Walters, who explicitly admits that his claim about 25,800 deaths was incorrect. Does this prove Steve’s claim is false under these rules? Maybe not, because Steve says he confirmed it “3 different ways”, so first you’d have to figure out what the other two ways Steve used to “confirm” this information and disprove both of those. Steve doesn’t clearly spell out what these 3 different ways are, though. We could speculate that one of the other “ways” was VAERS data, but even if the judges accept this interpretation, how do you prove that ~7,000 deaths in VAERS does not correspond to 25,800 deaths in reality? Sure, I’ve made arguments that this is likely to be nonsense, but clearly proving it could be hard-to-impossible depending on how the judges judge.
Another issue is that a challenge can only be successful if the claim is “non-corrected”. (edit: looks like the rules don’t clarify what non-corrected means). So, Steve claimed the vaccines have “disabled at least 1,000,000″ Americans. Hypothetically, let’s say this blog post was read by 2,000,000 people, but then Steve “corrects” this claim in a different post read by 10,000 people. Would that make the original claim ineligible to be challenged? Hard to say—once again it’s up to the judges.
Just a couple of hours ago I noticed that Steve K’s big article contradicts itself; it states that “Biodistribution of lipid nanoparticles which carry the mRNA show that the ovaries get the highest concentration” and it also states that “the vaccine takes about 15 minutes to set fire to every part of your body at the same time (and the biggest fire is in your ovaries)”. But data in a chart in the same article shows this to be false! (see also this.) So, why is it that none of the successful challenges demonstrated that this claim is false? Well, if we can’t look at the rejected submissions, I guess all we can do is unfalsifiable speculation ;)
* by the way, isn’t vaccination during a pandemic completely normal? e.g. annual Flu vaccines, and the early days of smallpox and polio vaccination. Not to mention that the alternative — waiting for the pandemic to be over before vaccinating people — is silly.
I stumbled across the Better Skeptics “Ground Truth Challenge” which offered prize money for identifying false statements in this and three other related podcasts, judged by three referees including our own ciphergoth.
Results are here.
This site puts the burden of proof on critics to prove that statements by the anti-vax leaders are false. I think this is problematic because most of the claims coming out of the mouths of Weinstein, Kirsch, etc. are...
unfalsifiable claims (e.g. “the [VAERS] reports were put in by people and [snaps fingers] they disappeared”)
speculation (“vaccinating into a pandemic rather than in advance of a pandemic, is liable to cause the evolution of escaped mutants, and that it could...make a much worse pandemic in the end”*)
vague motte-and-baily type claims (e.g. “the spike protein is dangerous”), whose goalpost is unclear so that whether the claim is falsified is very much in the eye of the beholder.
difficult or impossible to prove false on a budget less than the reward amount of $100, especially as lots of the claims do not identify any source they are based on.
Also, the fact that 123 out of the 126 submissions were unsuccessful suggests that the judges were very strict in their judgements.
I can’t tell what reasoning they used to reject 123 of the entries; most of the links away from the result page are dead links that just say “File is in owner’s trash”.
Edit: in fact there is a category called “Unsupported claim” which seems to have a lower burden of proof (reward: $50); still, somehow 98% of submissions were unsuccessful. Also, the official rules limit submissions to four specific podcast episodes; they don’t accept challenges to source material such as Steve’s blog, and I didn’t initially realize this so I did challenge Steve’s blog here.
But let’s consider, for example, Steve’s claim that “these vaccines have likely killed over 25,800 Americans”, which links to Walters, who explicitly admits that his claim about 25,800 deaths was incorrect. Does this prove Steve’s claim is false under these rules? Maybe not, because Steve says he confirmed it “3 different ways”, so first you’d have to figure out what the other two ways Steve used to “confirm” this information and disprove both of those. Steve doesn’t clearly spell out what these 3 different ways are, though. We could speculate that one of the other “ways” was VAERS data, but even if the judges accept this interpretation, how do you prove that ~7,000 deaths in VAERS does not correspond to 25,800 deaths in reality? Sure, I’ve made arguments that this is likely to be nonsense, but clearly proving it could be hard-to-impossible depending on how the judges judge.
Another issue is that a challenge can only be successful if the claim is “non-corrected”. (edit: looks like the rules don’t clarify what non-corrected means). So, Steve claimed the vaccines have “disabled at least 1,000,000″ Americans. Hypothetically, let’s say this blog post was read by 2,000,000 people, but then Steve “corrects” this claim in a different post read by 10,000 people. Would that make the original claim ineligible to be challenged? Hard to say—once again it’s up to the judges.
Just a couple of hours ago I noticed that Steve K’s big article contradicts itself; it states that “Biodistribution of lipid nanoparticles which carry the mRNA show that the ovaries get the highest concentration” and it also states that “the vaccine takes about 15 minutes to set fire to every part of your body at the same time (and the biggest fire is in your ovaries)”. But data in a chart in the same article shows this to be false! (see also this.) So, why is it that none of the successful challenges demonstrated that this claim is false? Well, if we can’t look at the rejected submissions, I guess all we can do is unfalsifiable speculation ;)
* by the way, isn’t vaccination during a pandemic completely normal? e.g. annual Flu vaccines, and the early days of smallpox and polio vaccination. Not to mention that the alternative — waiting for the pandemic to be over before vaccinating people — is silly.