{"id":1439,"date":"2018-03-31T15:53:45","date_gmt":"2018-03-31T22:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lessons4leaders.wordpress.com\/?p=68"},"modified":"2018-03-31T15:53:45","modified_gmt":"2018-03-31T22:53:45","slug":"gigo-garbage-in-garbage-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/gigo-garbage-in-garbage-out\/","title":{"rendered":"GI:GO (Garbage In: Garbage Out)"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have been many articles I have come across that have led me to believe that they are not exactly the full truth. As I was looking at Michael Caulfield’s website<\/a>, I started thinking about which story I was going to use in completing this assignment. I then came across an article<\/a> that stated that the FDA had now proven that vaccines cause autism. Since this was a hot-button topic, I decided to use this article.<\/p>\n

When I first clicked on the website InShapeToday.com, I noticed that there were three fixed pages: Legal Disclaimer, About Us, and Contact. When I checked out the Legal Disclaimer page<\/a>, one of the first things I noticed is that this was not actual medical advice or information; this site was to “create awareness” as the authors of the site “are not physicians and do not pretend to be”. This medical information site had no medically-trained authors.<\/p>\n

When I looked at the About Us page, I saw that another reader had made the statement<\/a>, “A website on the\u00a0Godaddy.com<\/a>\u00a0domain, with a Registration Private. Looks more as a fake news…” The only information listed here was that the authors were individuals who prized information about healthy living. The Contact Us page just had an email listed; there was no other contact information.<\/p>\n

When I looked at the article again, I found a reference to a discussion on Snopes around this information. The authors claimed that Snopes was one of the sources for their information. When I clicked on the Snopes link, a WordPress blogpost came up with an article that was virtually verbatim with the InShapeToday article I first read. This new blog did not use the word Snopes anywhere, so at least this blog was not trying to impersonate Snopes. I then went directly to Snopes and found the article that InShapeToday was quoting. It turns out that the information in the InShapeToday post was<\/em> accurate but very incomplete. It was true that the FDA listed autism as a possible side-effect of vaccines. However, the sentence introducing the possible side-effects had been omitted. That sentence stated<\/a>, “Because these reactions are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequency or establish a causal relationship to drug exposure”.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The InShapeToday site also wrote the article as if it was new information as of March 31, 2018. This article was copied from the A Mind Unchained<\/em> blog, and was actually written in November 2017. The original article, as found on Snopes, stating that vaccines caused autism was written in 2016. The FDA article it purported to quote was accurate as of 2005 but was later retracted in 2010. That information is also left out of the InShapeToday post. According to Snopes<\/a>, “The insert information was labeled current \u201cas of December 2005,\u201d which first would mean its sudden \u201cdiscovery\u201d by an anonymous blogger over a decade later was of questionable (if not negligible) import. But the age of the documentation was important for a second reason: the prominent medical journal\u00a0The Lancet<\/a><\/em>\u00a0didn\u2019t formally retract a controversial 1998 research paper which falsely advanced the belief that vaccines were linked to autism until\u00a0February 2010<\/a>. While that retraction was significant and definitive, twelve years passed between the paper\u2019s publication and\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Lancet<\/em>\u2018s disavowal of it….\u00a0So while it was true autism was listed among the reported adverse events in the Tripedia\/DTaP vaccine\u2019s insert, that same insert explained that all adverse events were listed, regardless of evidence of causation. Furthermore, the insert was current as of 2005, and was therefore hardly a novel finding in 2016. Five years after the Tripedia insert was printed,\u00a0The Lancet<\/em>\u00a0formally retracted the 1998 paper to which fears about vaccines and autism were largely attributed, but by that point, the advancement of that idea had already left a palpable mark on public health in both the United States and in the UK.\u00a0However, as FDA adverse events reporting standards dictate, all adverse reports recorded in association with drugs are included in such documents, no matter how likely (or unlikely) it was that the drug had caused them”. The quoted FDA side-effect sheet also included increased risk of motor vehicle deaths and accidental drownings.<\/p>\n

Based on Michael Caulfield’s Web Literacy For Student Fact Checkers<\/a>, checking for previous work, going upstream to the source, and reading laterally all lead to the same conclusion: this web page is providing false information.<\/p>\n

This activity lends itself to exploring all manner of claims found on the internet (and elsewhere). It does take time (and a little effort) and thus may be too bothersome for many. This activity does, however, provide easy guidelines for checking the truthfulness of any information.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been many articles I have come across that have led me to believe that they are not exactly the full truth. As I was looking at Michael Caulfield’s website, I started thinking about which story I was going to use in completing this assignment. I then came across an article that stated that … Continue reading GI:GO (Garbage In: Garbage Out)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,22,63,1],"tags":[37,94,97,98,93,99],"class_list":["post-1439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-literacy","category-flow","category-ma-lead-faculty","category-twu-online","tag-blog","tag-challenge","tag-four-moves","tag-omission","tag-search","tag-truth","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8GjXS-nd","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/251"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1440,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1439\/revisions\/1440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/orientation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}