Facebooks laughable fact-checking

 So this is an excerpt from the Facebook Fact check on the Literature Review of the lockdowns on covid-19 mortality. Their claim is that it “Independent fact-checkers reviewed the information and said it was missing context and could mislead people.”

Those so-called independent fact-checkers are mostly supported by Facebook and Tik-Tok and some other Leftwing organizations and private donors who donated in 2016. Yes not too updated there are they and they are not at all objective. For example, here they complain about the use of the word lockdown.

“Another point of contention was the paper’s definition of a lockdown. A lockdown is typically defined as a measure that requires people to stay at home and avoid activity outside the home involving public contact. However, the authors defined a lockdown as “the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI)”. Non-pharmaceutical interventions are measures apart from taking medicine and vaccination. This means that simply making isolation for infected people mandatory or imposing a mask mandate would count as a lockdown.”

From the original:

[We use “NPI” to describe any government mandate which directly restrict peoples’ possibilities. Our definition does not include governmental recommendations, governmental information campaigns, access to mass testing, voluntary social distancing, etc., but do include mandated interventions such as closing schools or businesses, mandated face masks etc. We define lockdown as any policy consisting of at least one NPI as described above.4]

 Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist and professor at Imperial College London, pointed out that “by that definition, the UK has been in permanent lockdown since 16th of March 2021, and remains in lockdown – given it [remains] compulsory for people with diagnosed COVID-19 to self-isolate for at least 5 days.”

 Samir Bhatt, a professor of statistics and public health at Imperial College London, likewise expressed similar concerns about the definition used in the paper, saying, “The most inconsistent aspect is the reinterpreting of what a lockdown is […] For a meta-analysis using a definition that is at odds with the dictionary definition (a state of isolation or restricted access instituted as a security measure) is strange.”

[Actually the dictionary definition is: “b: a temporary condition imposed by governmental authorities (as during the outbreak of an epidemic disease) in which people are required to stay in their homes and refrain from or limit activities outside the home involving public contact (such as dining out or attending large gatherings)”] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lockdown

That being said, when it came to their analysis, the authors applied the usual definition of a lockdown, as Bhatt pointed out: “The authors then further confuse matters when in Table 7 they revert to the more common definition of lockdown.”

So a table that breaks down the studies by NPI suddenly becomes reverting to the more common definition by having a heading that says: Lockdown(complete/partial).  As usual Facebook fact-checks are garbage!