Covid Bias at the BMJ

Do something, anything!

This week, Ioannidis and his colleagues published a paper on COVID-19 advocacy bias in the BMJ, concluding that the ‘BMJ had a strong bias in favour of authors advocating an aggressive approach to COVID-19 mitigation.’

The authors don't hold back, saying the ‘BMJ had massive bias towards specific COVID-19-related advocacy favouring aggressive measures’. The BMJ became an outlet for indieSAGE/Vaccines-Plus advocates who outperformed SAGE members, (16-fold), Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) advocates (64-fold) and 16-fold compared with the most-cited group. Short opinion pieces and analyses drove the majority of these differences.

Advocates of restricted, focused measures were virtually extinct from the BMJ pages: ‘BMJ editors, staff and apparently advocate contributors developed a massive literature, comprised mostly of opinion pieces that in general (as acknowledged by the BMJ) underwent no external review in the BMJ.”

If the BMJ were a broadcaster, it would have been reported to OFCOM…