Media Storm - Bad Science: Faux facts, health fads, influencers

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Care about ethical news? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Learn more about Open Britain’s petition for electoral reform: you have until 28th July! Does coffee cause or cure cancer?! Do eggs heal or herald heart attacks?! If you were to read everything you need in the press, you’d be very confused! It’s ALL - and also NONE - of the above! This episode is about ‘New research shows…’ headlines, and how the media commodifies science into clickbait. Take this Washington Post article from earlier this month: ‘4 proven health benefits of drinking coffee”. Note the term “proven”. Yet as one physician commented: “not a single study you referenced demonstrated causation”. Whether it’s for clickbait or e-commerce or ‘churnalism’ (press releases by private corporations regurgitated as news), we’re inundated with ‘health’ articles that too often feed us useless, non-information. They might not kill you, but by systematically undermining the public’s understanding of science and evidence, they may be doing a huge amount of harm. It is precisely this that allows things like anti-vax conspiracy theories, climate-denialism or exploitative wellness influencing to flourish. Our guest today, Dr Deborah Cohen, is an expert in the “Wellness Industrial Complex”. Drug companies aren’t allowed to market straight to patients in the UK, but by using celebrity influencers and news outlets, they’re getting around that. The result? Cohen argues: “Health has been commodified in an age of anxiety, to the point where we can no longer tell medicine apart from marketing.” Get ready to learn about stats and quacks– but don’t worry, it’s not all maths. It’s media literacy. This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠). It was edited by Christy Callaway-Gale. The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠@mediastormpod⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gregus believes in the art of living in choosing the pleasurable over the practical. It's why we craft our premium vodka in France using pure spleen water from Gensack. And why you hear the celebratory pub of our quirk, reminding us to make every martini cocktail count. So go on and make every moment count because there's no better time than now. Gregus, make time wait. The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum. Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine,

the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu Disney Plus. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Open Britain, a grassroots campaign group making democracy work for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. And on that, before we begin, we want to draw your attention to a petition. Did you catch our recent episode on elections? It was about the UK's first-past-the-post voting system and whether it hurts or helps democracy today. With a new Prime Minister, fresh into Downing Street, the movement for electoral reform is petitioning, Andy Burnham to set up a National Commission. It's something he said he supported, but history

teachers, most people who say they'll reform the system, declined to do so once it puts them in power. So if it caught your ear and you want to learn more or add your name to the petition, you've got until next Tuesday to follow the link in the show notes. New research shows an egg a day could significantly reduce cardiovascular disease risk. New study finds eggs will break your heart, eating even small amounts significantly raise the risk for cardiovascular disease. Groundbreaking study finds eggs don't harm heart health. Fasting diets may raise risk of diabetes, research has worn. A glass of red wine a day is good for your heart.

Zero alcohol is the safest option. Uh, hello to you too, Matilda. Go on then. What is today's episode about? Bad research or research has shown headlines. So those are all headline-making studies from the past decade. Individually, they claim to provide readers with a significant revelation, but together they become unhelpful and nonsensical. This episode is about how some media commodifies science into clickbait.

Take this Washington Post article from earlier this month, four proven health benefits of drinking coffee. Note the term proven, yet as one physician commented, not a single study you've referenced demonstrated causation. There's also this CNN story which was published the day before. Coffee may lower risk for liver disease and cancer. The article then links to CNN's affiliate commerce page of Best Coffee Makers where news outlets get commissions on clicks.

Wait, so coffee doesn't cure cancer. Damn it. Yeah, these articles feed people useless, non-information. They might not kill you. But in systematically undermining the public's understanding of science or evidence, they are arguably doing a huge amount of harm. To quote Ben Goldacre, the author of Bad Science, research has shown stories, sell the idea that science

and indeed the whole empirical worldview is about tenuous, new, hotly contested data and spectacular breakthroughs. Science is temporary, changeable, constantly revising itself like a transient fad. It is precisely this thinking that allows things like anti-vax conspiracy theories, climate denialism, exploitative wellness influencing to flourish.

I cannot count the amount of new study shows or new data shows, emails and pitches that we get all the time in our inboxes. They come ready packaged by PR companies who realize that overworked, underpaid journalists with constant quotas to meet might just jump at an easy headline and AI has made this so much more prolific. Exactly. And. And, And it's telling, right? Because PR companies know exactly where news outlets weaknesses like. Like you say, overworked, overquoted. But it's also a weakness for bogus data. The media loves data that presents as academic, but is actually nothing of the sort because academic data is much less likely to deliver melodramatic, sensationalist conclusions than crappy data. This reflects

a major flaw in our media, a contempt towards science and a general ignorance among journalists and their readers about how statistics actually work. Oh no, I see where you're taking this, Matilda. We're going to have a little data lesson and yes, it's going to get mathy. No. We must. Because this is not just about selling us bogus diets and face creams. The worst data offences, in my opinion, are committed on moral topics, abortion, drugs, immigration. This is an episode on bad science, yes, but also bad social science. Just like new research shows that coffee may either cure or cause cancer, new research also shows that migrants commit crimes or fossil fuels aren't really the problem or taxing the rich will tank the economy. Our headlines are often

plastered with data that are completely inaccurate and we have to ask how that's allowed to happen. Okay, okay, let's do this. Maths time. The data lesson we're about to get is taken from the book Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. It was written in 2008, and yet it's still so relevant, a reflection of just how little has been learned. In March 2006, the Times published an article headed, Cocaine Floods the Playground. It went on use of the addictive drug by children doubles in a year. If you read the press release for the government survey, the original report, right? It says almost no change in patterns of drug use, drinking or smoking, since 2000. The telegraph also ran the cocaine uses double story, so did the mirror.

But the survey, which you can download yourself online, is a survey of 9,000 children aged 11 to 15 in 305 schools. The summary said, again, that there was no change in the prevalence of drug use. And if you look at the full report, you'll find the raw data tables. When asked if they had used cocaine in the past year, 1% said yes in 2004, and 2% said yes in 2005. So that looks like double, until you realise almost all the figures given were rounded off. They were all 1 or 2%. But the actual figures were 1.4% in 2004 and 1.9% in 2005, not 1% and 2%. So that's the first way that the data had been botched. So what we have is a relative risk increase of 0.5%. If we use the real numbers, out of 9,000 kids, we have about 45 more saying yes to the question, did you take cocaine in the past year?

The next thing you have to ask yourself, is this statistically relevant? Ben Goldacre did the maths, and on the surface, the answer was yes. Now, that means that you get a P value of less than 0.05. What the F is a P value? I thought you might say that. A P value is a margin of error needed to determine whether your findings actually meet the threshold of evidence. Don't worry, you don't have to remember all this, you just have to get the point. So the standard cutoff point for statistical significance is a P value of 0.05. That's just another way of saying, if I did this experiment 100 times, I'd expect to get a spurious result on five occasions just by chance. Okay, I'm following. So it is statistically relevant. It's just not double like the papers claimed. Well, it might have been relevant if the data wasn't clustered. Right. Great. And what is clustered? So these are not just data points. These are real children. They hang out together. They copy each other. So the increase of 45 kids taking cocaine could have been a massive epidemic of cocaine use in one school or mini epidemics in a.

a handful of schools. If they're not independent data points, the results become less statistically significant, as statisticians would say you must correct for clustering. Okay, so when you correct for clustering, does the claim of cocaine use already down from doubling even survive? No, because there is one final major problem with this data. There's so much of it to choose from. The government survey didn't just look at cocaine, but solvents, cigarettes, ketamine, cannabis. A P value of 0.05 means that for every hundred comparisons you do, five will be positive just by chance alone. From this report, you could have done dozens of comparisons, and some of them would indeed have shown increases in usage, but by chance alone. And the cocaine figure could be one of those.

This is why statisticians do a correction for multiple comparisons, which is particularly brutal on data and often eradicates the significance of the findings completely. Oh my God, this is so much more rigorous than the process most editors require journalists to put our data through. It's true. I find it personally to be a real wake-up call. Headline data is not academic data. And frankly, that may make it worth very little. Data dredging is a dangerous sport. In the case of the Times's cocaine claim, the people who compiled the original government report knew about clustering.

They were professional statisticians. Presumably, Goldacre points out, that's why they said clearly in their press release, there was no change from 2004 to 2005. But the journalists and their editors, who know or care little about stats, chose to ignore this. Okay, so I agree,

journalists are often bad at statistics. let's be real, we're mostly all humanities babies. But we're not so bad that we don't understand rounded up figures. Whoever wrote that actively chose scaremongering over accuracy. That is clickbait, short and simple. I agree. I mean, clickbait is how most media make money. But it's not just about money.

It's also about power. The more sinister side of this world comes in the form of think tanks, or at least they call themselves think tanks. And don't get me wrong, are obviously some amazing think tanks out there. But something we are seeing more and more of today are opacely funded lobby groups that pose as think tanks. They pose as objective, as academic, but they are nothing of the sort. We're going to cover this topic in two episodes. In this episode, we'll focus on the medical science angle. In the second episode, we'll look at

the social science angle, digging more into these dodgy think tanks. Many of the very of these so-called think tanks are in bed with politicians. They're funded by super wealthy individuals, think fossil fuel magnates and tobacco barons. And some of those people also fund the very news outlets that publish these think tanks findings front page every time. How are we supposed to fight that? Well, look, it's also about us. Human nature makes us easy to manipulate. We like echo chambers. We want one-pill fixes for complex problems, we choose evidence that suits our existing views. But the positive side of that is it's also in our power to guard against it. OK, so this is about media literacy, not maths. Yay!

We don't have to do the numbers. We just have to know which questions to ask. And that's exactly what Media Storm is here for. Trust in the news has fallen to its lowest level since global monitoring began, Consuming one egg every day could lower the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Another study is warning us to avoid eating eggs. People are avoiding the news, turning away from legacy media. Online misinformation is becoming a real threat to public health. Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last.

I'm Matilda Mallinson and I'm Helen Awardia. This week's Media Storm. Bad Science. Foufacts, fads and influencers. Welcome to the Media Storm Studio. Our guest today is a medically qualified journalist, broadcaster and editor. She founded the Investigations Unit at the British Medical Journal, was science editor at ITV News and health correspondent on BBC News Night, and she's the recent author of Bad Influence, How the Internet Hijacked Our Health.

A very warm welcome to Media Storm, Dr Deborah Cohen. Thank you for having me. So we'll begin this episode looking at the industry's churning out bad research. And after the break, we'll talk about the news media's role in spreading it and how to guard against it. Deborah, your book Bad Influence argues that health has been commodified in an age of anxiety to the point where we can no longer tell medicine apart from marketing. This centres around what you termed the wellness industrial complex. So tell us what is the wellness industrial complex. So what do I mean by wellness industrial complex?

So what I mean by that is for years we have known that companies have shaped our understanding of health. We know that they have determined what gets research, what gets published or doesn't get published. So famously, the tobacco industry knew that smoking caused cancer, but sat on that research for years, didn't publish it. We've known for years that the fossil fuel industry have known about climate change and the oil industry's contribution to climate change. sat on that research. And we know that the drug industry, for example, decides what research has done, what we measure, which participants in clinical trials are included. We also know all of these companies lobby governments to shape policy and practice. But we've seen a shift in which industries are big and important. So increasingly, we've got tech industry that's shaping our

health. We've got supplements. We have this whole new area of wellness that's worth trillions of dollars. And they're shaping our health in lots of different ways. So I think of the wellness industrial complex really is a bit of a mash-up of the drug industry, the tech industry, supplements, wearables, all these diagnostic tests that you can buy. They're telling us what is well, what is unwell, and they're shaping what we think about our health and how we perceive our symptoms, what is research, what isn't researched, even our relationship with our healthcare professionals. And so that's what I mean. It's a huge industry that has grown over the last 10, 20 years, and they're all having an impact on our health.

Well, let's look at some of the misconceptions that have been fed by this industry. Deborah, you've been reporting on this issue since long before the book. During the swine flu pandemic in 2009, you investigated Tamiflu, a drug made by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche. A drug the UK government spent nearly half a billion pound stockpiling between 2006 and 2013. How was the research that informed this decision a very good example of bad data? So what happened? And it was the swine flu pandemic.

This was the first big investigation I'd ever done. It's 2009. And there was a group of independent academics called the Cochrane Collaboration that had been commissioned to update our knowledge on a drug called Tamifflit. And this drug had been stopped piled to the tune of half a billion. And it's all premised on the idea that this drug Tamiflu, it was going to reduce serious illness and death. by about 50% and hospitalisation. So people going into hospital by similar numbers. And if you think

about a pandemic, one of the things that you want to do, A, you want to stop people dying and get very sick, but you want to stop them going into hospital as well because that stops the burden on the hospital. So what they tried to do was update all the information on Tamiflu, but what they found is they couldn't because those claims had been based on data that hadn't been published. So there have been 10 trials of Tamiflu

in healthy people that supported these claims. Only two of those trials have been published. Eight of them haven't. So decisions were based on partial information and ethically, if you do a clinical trial and we have something called the Declaration of Health,

Sinky, which guides medical ethics in trials, if people are part of a trial, they should expect those results to be published. They have altruistically given themselves to medical research, and it's only ethical that they do that. So what happened was Channel 4 News and I teamed up, along the BMJ, teamed up to try and see if we could find the data. And we approached the authors of this key study, the key study that made these claims. And none of them could provide the data. It was all classic, the dog at my homework. Oh, I haven't got the data. I've literally said, oh, I've moved computers and offices and I've lost all the data. So what it turned out is these studies had been ghost authored and the lead authors on them have been guests. And what we expect

in research is the people that put their names on the research are guardians of the evidence. So in effect, the world had stopped health this drug on the basis of claims that could not be supported by evidence. And it wasn't just the absence of the data. Turns out the experts that were advising WHO, guess who they were on the payroll of? Roche. No way. Yeah. What was fascinating was you can kind of say governments have stopped piled and spent billions on a drug that lacks the evidence for the claims. And that sort of explodes, but it was really explosive to say, well, actually, people have massive conflicts of interest in their genders. I want to know how common this is,

because we're talking here about one drug, Tamiflu, but how common is it whether medical drugs that we are prescribed, what could have happened is positive trials that showed they are very efficient, have been pushed out, and negative trials that show maybe, I don't know, dubious side effects or maybe placebos performing better than the drug itself. The negative trials just aren't published. Put it this way, my old boss at the BMJ, Richard Smith, wrote a book called

How Medical Journals are the Marketing Arm of the Drug Industry. So medical journals themselves are less likely to publish negative trials. So it's not only the fact that the drug industry perhaps is less likely to want to publish them in the first place, because there are other ways of massaging data, not just not publishing trials. There are other ways of making your drug look far more favourable than it is. But then journals are selective in what they publish. So the whole pipeline from the very start of drug development

right through the publication to the publication is commercially influenced. And then you have to rely on the regulators to respond when there are problems. And then drug regulators, bluntly, where do they get their money from? They are paid by companies to regulate the drugs. There's burst incentives and there's money right throughout the system. And as a result, Deborah, your argument presented in the book is that we can no longer tell medicine apart from marketing. And this has been turbocharged by the internet, by social media, by health influences and celebrities. As a more current example, you look at weight loss culture.

This is the OZMPIC era. In 2024, the NHS aimed to put 220,000 people on weight loss jabs. Within a year, 1.6 million Britons were taking them. the vast majority were buying them privately online. Now, it's important to highlight that there are clear benefits to the drug. It's been linked to cutting heart attacks, strokes and cardiac deaths. So some of the demand for a Zempic is driven by legitimate health needs, but a lot of it, you say, is not.

Talk us through the difference. So originally, it was a ZemPic that was licensed, and it was licensed for type 2 diabetes. But when they started using it, they noticed people, lost weight. And then it started a big trend. Celebrities were, you know, taking a Zen pick. Jimmy Kimmel mentioned it when he was, you know, presenting the Oscars. Look, I look around the room and how many of you are taking a Zen pic. That's the elephant in the room. It's the Zempic generation. But if you look at the trials, who's in the trials, there are people who are obese. They have a high

BMI, probably high than a lot of people that are taking it now. But they also, did other things around take the drug in the child. So they also had dietary advice and exercise. So the drugs weren't being taken on their own. And that is how the NHS offers it. The NHS offers the drug as part of a program as a weight loss program, not you just go into your GP and you get a quick prescription and then you cash it in.

But there's a whole market around it that's grown up. And social media is one of those places where it's talked about and people talk about experimenting with different doses. is even combining different drugs that totally go off-peased from or divert away from how the drugs are licensed or recommended by the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence or Nice. And the issue is, they're not the population that have been studied. And any drug has a benefit and a harm. There is nothing that is without harm.

And I think we're still finding out about what those side effects are. We know there are side effects like nausea and sickness. and diarrhea. But the longer-term harms, we don't yet know. There are concerns around pancreatitis and the MHRA, our drug regulator is looking at that at the moment. And if there is a risk of pancreatitis and you take the drug and it only helps you drop a couple of pounds, is that a trade-off worth taking? And of course, this is something that is just amplified by society, a society that has always told women that there is only one type of body shape

that they should be, which has been amplified by the media. It was, you know, George Orwell, that said the true genius in advertising is to sell you the solution and the problem. And I think we really see that reflected in our weight loss culture. In the UK, though,

it is illegal for drug companies to sell directly to consumers. why is that safeguard necessary? And are companies getting around that? It's a very good question. I've just written about this for the BMJ. So there's various reasons. First of all, there's evidence that it shapes prescribing practice.

We know that it increases, expectation can change doctor-patient relationships, that people are more likely to get prescription if they come in and they ask. for a drug. So it has effects. The benefits, obviously, are people get to learn about drugs that they might be eligible for that they didn't know about. But then there are concerns that it increases demand for drugs that perhaps aren't appropriate. And sometimes doing nothing is the right thing in medicine or something, or what we call a non-pharmacological approach. There's reason why, other than the United States and New Zealand, that direct to consumer advertising prescription drugs is banned. But what social media has done is allowed US-style

advertising into the UK. What I noticed when I was researching my book is I was in my feed on Instagram, there was an advert from prescription-owned migraine drug from Chloe Kardashian. And I thought, I shouldn't be seeing that. That's meant to be banned in the UK. And it wasn't the only one. Lady Gaga had been advertising the same drug. But I went to Meta and I said, well, I can see this in my feed. There's a ban. And Meta passed on the query to Edelman, big PR company. And they basically said, yeah, we're not going to answer this one. So I went to the advertising standards authority. And effectively, there's a loophole. If an advert is meant for a US audience, then we can still see it in our feeds. So that's, that's, that's, that's,

That's one way we're getting it. The other way is in some ways much harder to spot. So what drug companies do in the United States is they go to patients and they have relationships with them, financial relationships with them. The issue is with patient influences, we've got no idea who they are. And I was speaking to researchers in the United States that are trying to study this and they were like, it's really hard. First of all, they won't really speak to you, they're reluctant to speak to you, you can't get any information about how much they're being paid because it's all NDAs. What makes it hard for regulators as well is regulators can regulate claims, but it's very hard for them to regulate personal stories. So it's very

hard for them to say, well, that didn't really happen to you or that wasn't the effect that you found. And the other big issue that's very different from the sort of glossy pharmaceutical company adverts that you might see magazines or newspapers or teens. Or teard. TV is it relies on parisocial relationships. So they pick people that have already got relationships with their followers. You feel you've got a relationship with somebody, even though it's very one-sided and that person only shows you what they want you to know, but they might respond to comments under their feed and make you feel like you're included and that they know you. So we've got this whole new world. And there have been health influences who've been exposed for basically

pretending to have been diagnosed with some condition in order to push a medicine or a treatment or a lifestyle regime that they are actually being low-key paid to do. But I guess the question then is, so what? Why do you care? Why do you care how people waste their money on whatever new face cream or drug or treatment isn't going to change their life?

This is a good question. I think everybody wants to be informed consumers. obviously people can do. We do live in a free society and I would never tell people what they should and shouldn't do. That said, often these things aren't studied. So there is a harm as well, but often it ends up in the NHS. And I was at a round table in Parliament a couple of weeks ago to discuss the book with a couple of MPs and there were doctors for more different specialties. So, for example, there was a fertility doctor there, NHS, who was saying to me that a lot of these hormone tests that are being sold, without good evidence, are ending up in his clinic in the health service. And what happens is there's a knock-on effect.

Because if that person's being seen for things that actually aren't a problem, it means people who actually have problems aren't being seen. The other issue is, as well, the people that tend to be able to afford this stuff, are they healthy and wealthy? and that has an impact on social inequality. So people that perhaps need these things most or need to be seen most are not being seen. It's called the inverse care law. We already know that people that need healthcare most are least likely to get it. But the question is how much this is exacerbating inequality. So if they're healthy and wealthy, can buy these things, are ending up in the NHS, it means less resource again.

So in a way, there's a broader social issue here. public health issue than just on the individual level. Individuals obviously are entitled to do what they want and can buy what they want within reason, obviously. But there is a broader societal impact and I don't think we know the full extent of it. Okay, that is a lot of information to process. Let's take a quick break. And next up, how dodgy data gets publicized by the media. There's no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellair direct.com.

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So far, we've looked at several examples of bad science. The next question is, why do we trust it? And here we have to look in part at. the media. Deborah, you wrote a recent column on Alzheimer's and one of the lines caught my eye. You said years of optimistic headlines have sold false hope to patients. Talk us through how and why the news media has done this. I think there's lots of reasons. But also I go back to the sort of how drugs are marketed. If you can't market directly to patients, you can market to journalists. So if you have a publication, you publish your most favourable results,

you create headlines around those results. And what companies do is they use something called a relative risk rather than an absolute risk in their headlines. So for example, if something reduces cancer by 50%. That is a great headline. Now, what that isn't taking into account is what we call the baseline risk. Let's say your risk of cancer is only 0.1%. That 50% is 50% of 0.1% is what it actually does. That is called the absolute risk reduction. So that is what 0.05%. That doesn't make quite the same headline, does it? This cancer, this drug might reduce your actual risk of cancer by 0.05% as opposed to 50%. So they use clever statistics.

A statistic that you see in the headline may bear really very little resemblance to the raw data. And actually the effect of that is that we are just being given non-news. But it's more harmful because it's not just non-news. It's not just nonsense. It's nonsense that manipulates our understanding of the fundamentals of science. And it makes us easier to manipulate. And what those statistics do is they create an expectation and they hope a pressure on the regulators to approve a drug.

If you've created a sort of further around a product, the regulators may feel more inclined, oh, we need to approve this. But then you use creative ways of marketing it. And that's what we saw with the Alzheimer's drugs, is those headlines didn't really reflect what the papers were actually, what the research was actually saying. But also when you look at a drug, it's not just the benefit, it's the harms.

And often that doesn't make the headlines. What we see with headlines is either this is a miracle drug or this drug is terrible. When often it's the murky truth is in between. It's this messy grey area that is medicine. And I think what often the media does is portrays science and medicine as more certain than it actually is. Right. And let's talk about that a bit more, the kind of combination. of social media and news headlines, news in inverted commas.

Your book criticises a number of celebrities and influencers who peddled these unverified health advice. You mentioned earlier Chloe Kardashian, who appeared extensively across Instagram and YouTube promoting this drug that was a migraine treatment. The Daily Mail actually turned her content into news. In one headline, they described, the drug as a pill endorsed by Chloe Kardashian that stops migraines in their tracks. Why is that so concerning? First of all, it's a very bold way of stay. It's very certain, isn't it?

It stops migraines in its tracks. Does it stop migraines in its tracks? What's the data? That's why we have medical statistics. We talk about risk in medicine. So you're balancing risks. and what risk means it's a statistical term of how effective is this drug and what percentage, what is the likelihood of you getting a benefit of this drug and you getting a harm for that drug?

Also, a bit questionable. It's, again, the extension of direct to consumer marketing, isn't it, directly on the pages of all the website, the Daily Mail. It sort of all feeds the beast. And that's what I think's interesting. So one of the interventions that I look at in the book is full body MRI. So they're full body scans. Yes, every celebrity, every influencer, every reality TV store I follow is going for these full body MRIs.

And there isn't a single medical body around the world that recommends them for healthy people. Not one. Even the American College of Radiology whose members would stand to. gain from promoting them. Not even they recommend them. And then, but what, what's really interesting is the clamour on social media then has led to headlines and articles in the mainstream press. So we've got this bit of this feeding frenzy. I can start on social media. And then there ends up being reports on them in the press to varying degrees. Yeah, it honestly, like really made me feel like, oh, should I be getting one? Like, should I be getting one of these

full body MRIs because then I'm going to find out everything that's like wrong with myself and then I'll be able to like sort it all out but it surely it doesn't work like that so if you have symptoms you go in and you go say to a doctor I've got these symptoms and they do tests it's like a detective following the leads to work out what's going on screening again use tests but it's on healthy people with no symptoms we're telling people it used to be you're healthy until you're and sick. Now it's sick until proven healthy. And it goes back to what Orwell was saying, you know, you're sort of telling the people the problem and then giving them the solution. And what on social media you're doing, you're creating a fear. There might be something inside

you that you don't know about, I've got the product for you. With the Azempic, actually, there's this whole new thing now, a Zempic face, right? You take the Azemik and then you get a Zempic face And now there are these treatments to treat your OZMPIC face. So, yeah, George Orwell says, you know, true marketing genius is don't just sell them the solution, sell them the problem. And it plays into this anxiety and undermines our health as well. There's one other issue or problematic practice that I want to get your views on. And that is false balance, right? Media and particularly the BBC has this very ingrained idea of balance.

but sometimes that means we present an issue as two-sided when it's not. And with science, well, science is often not two-sided, at least the point of science is to try and work towards a consensus that is based in evidence. One of the areas that this has been a huge problem is vaccines. Today, we are seeing a resurgence in measles with tens of thousands of cases surging across the UK, US and Europe. One of the main factors behind this is considered to be the decade of media coverage from the late 90s that falsely implied scientists were divided over the safety of the MMR vaccine. That's measles, mumps and rebella. Headlines repeatedly cited one highly unreliable study which theorized that the MMR vaccine caused autism. The Institute of Medicine, the Royal Colleges, the NHS and more. They all came out in support of MMR, but less than a third of newspaper reports referred. to the overwhelming evidence that MMR is safe.

Also, only 11% mentioned that it's actually regarded and safe in all of the other 90 countries in which it is used. This at the time was just a British debate. The Daily Mail and the Telegraph in particular made MMR the focus of a massive political campaign and they basically beatified the author of the autism study, Andrew Wakefield. There's one telegraph feature where they fantasize about Hollywood depiction in which Wakefield is played by Russell Crow,

quote, opposite Julia Roberts as a feisty single mother fighting for justice for her child. So these are very sort of pushing and compelling narratives. Now today, these same outlets, they pile the blame on him individually. They describe his study as debunked when it was never really compelling in the first place. There hasn't been a huge amount of responsibility taken by the media from my perspective. Deborah, what do you think? Has the media learned from the MMR mistakes? vaccines are really hard to report on.

And I think what the debate around MMR has done has meant that we have quite an immature debate around vaccines. Everything has harm. Everything has side effects. And we have to be able to talk about that openly. I mean, obviously there's really good evidence for MMR and things like that. But what I hear sometimes is the simplification is just vaccines work. Well, again, that's. Public health need to sort of think about their messaging there

because not all vaccines are as effective as others. Some are very effective and some are less effective. If you are too certain and you are wrong, you lose a lot of currency. If you allow that to happen, then doubt starts to, you're sowing those seeds of doubt that those that capitalise on mistrust in authority and mistrust in vaccines, then will really sort of harness. You know, we have to mention there, of course, Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy and what they are doing in America,

because when you start to undermine trust in science, trust in experts, trust in evidence, you concentrate a lot of disproportionate informational power in those sitting in the executive body. It's dangerous. And it's two-way, I guess. Throughout my career, I've scrutinized science. And everywhere, I think, needs scrutiny. And it is worrying seeing the rise in the measles outbreaks because there's a very, very effective vaccine. You know, with Trump and RFK Jr. Again, it lends authority to that skepticism. So it's, you know, it's difficult.

But scientists sort of have to be on the front foot. And what we have to allow is people to ask questions and not dismiss them as anti-vaxxers. if they're scared or worried about a vaccination. So I just want to close this discussion by looking at solutions and particularly the solutions that we individually, our listeners individually, have power over. Next time listeners see a health influencer real, what questions should they be asking themselves?

So one thing I say to people is ask yourself, why is that person on that platform telling me this? It's full of the money, isn't it? It's, you know, if we talk in journalism terms, why is this person telling me this information? What's their, think about what their decision process is. And there's a lot of good people on there. Like social media has built community. It's helped people feel connected.

It's helped given people that feel ignored or unseen, women in particular, a voice. And their issues are being taken seriously. But we have to be careful. Just because something's like, Jory Pope is a lot. doesn't mean it's accurate. Thank you. Now, we've talked about your book, Bad Influence, that is available for anyone who wants to go and read it.

Deborah, just before we lose you, is there anywhere else that listeners can follow you and your work? So I'm in the normal press, and I'm on Instagram, Deb Cohen-001, X, Deb underscore Cohen, Deb's Cohen on Blue Sky, and then LinkedIn. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening.

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