Current status: bemused. Also frustrated.
About that recent Pfizer story and the awful dynamics of niche-serving news
TL;DR - sorry, but everyone has a point.
Having already set out a personal position of 'proportionate scepticism' on Covid vaccine controversies a new story erupts to put it to the test.
In an apparent sting, a man in a bar (or maybe a cafe) who works for Pfizer is recorded apparently boasting (or maybe confessing?) that Pfizer is secretly pursuing what sounds to the untrained ear like Gain-of-Function research on SARS-CoV-2 in order to get new vaccines to market more quickly.
He also says several other things. One of them is particularly interesting, because I happen to know that it's true. We'll come back to that one later.
Instantly the right-wing information sphere is ablaze with the story while it is absent in the centreish-leftish information sphere.
Being across both of these bubbles is an education in how information travels differently, depending on its implications.
News bias is not just about how the same events are interpreted differently. It's about what does or does not get reported at all.
It's obvious why this happens. Some things are inconvenient interruptions to a much-loved narrative, so they are treated quite differently, depending on which narrative you like.
At the very start of this Rarely Certain project to escape a familiar comfortable centreish-leftishist bubble and be more of an onlooker than a participant, that was the only surprise. You will never see some news stories about real and verifiable events unless you become a proactive, rather than passive, information consumer. More on that process here:
So, back to Pfizer's alleged dirty doings. Some readers will by now have clocked up a solid couple of weeks being excited about the story, whereas this will be the very first time some other readers have even heard that it happened.
Here's the original 'drop'. It's by Project Veritas, a conservative activist operation which specialises in embarrassing political targets.
Normally, Rarely Certain would link to a Wikipedia page in passing, to help readers get quickly up to speed on a term with which they might not already be familiar. The idea being that Wikipedia is a quick and easy universally familiar source of shared consensus knowledge.
In this case, the Wikipedia page for Project Veritas looks as if it has been written by a political operative from the other side. Wikipedia calls it 'far right', when I would call it 'right-wing'. It also focuses mainly on PV's failures.
In passing, it's remarkable that most people do not realise that there even is a political orientation to Wikipedia. I find it a valuable information source for many things, but it helps to understand its limitations when there are political implications to an entry. Editors are often wont to actively censor views they don't like and even ban references to mainstream sources of which they do not approve.1
Having often been dubbed as 'far left' in my Twitter days, when espousing views that still seem moderate, I tend to approach the label 'far-right' with scepticism. The Overton Window is obviously determined by the hegemonic political culture. Because we're currently in a culture that's vaguely leftish on most issues, just about any view outside of doctrine is automatically deemed extreme.
To make this observation is not to defend Project Veritas, which is just another shrill, shouty, activist 'non-profit' fuelling the culture wars. I tend to view these kind of provocateurs (whichever side they're on) as traders in emotional vulnerability, driven a bit by principle but mostly by ambition.
Some of PV's revelations can occasionally be somewhat interesting, sometimes surfacing a grain of something worth knowing. Often they are not, consisting of distorted or out-of-context factoids presented in such a way as to intentionally mislead people who are predisposed to like that sort of thing.
I find Project Veritas vaguely interesting, but rarely persuasive and certainly not the beacon of 'investigative journalism' that many of its fans believe it to be.
At the same time I'm deeply suspicious of pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer has a predictably bad track record for misleading, bullying, cutting corners and generally behaving as one might expect a huge profit-maximiser to behave. Big companies? They're all the same, to coin a very British old person's phrase.
No one would be more pleased than me to learn that Pfizer had been nailed for covertly putting the world at risk by cooking up new, more deadly SARS-CoV-2 variants, just so they could win the race to market with a highly profitable cure.
So I come at this one mostly with curiosity, but also wishing a bit that it will turn out to be everything that the billing promises it to be. Vaguely hoping that there really will be a there there, because it's satisfying to see bad actors exposed for nefarious deeds.
But, within a few seconds all the alarm bells of disappointment are jangling.
I've worked in TV news and I've done 'doorsteps' (stings on unsuspecting wrongdoers) and secret recording. Legitimate footage doesn't need editing as heavily as what I'm seeing.
<<Delete several extraneous paragraphs of midwitty 'fact-checky' dull reasons for why I end up feeling lukewarm, at most, about the 'bombshell' qualities of this sting>>
Having carefully listened to the 'revelations' (and read some printed transcripts) it just looks like an apparently intoxicated guy, apparently flirting like stink on an apparent date, probably just running his mouth to get laid. It doesn't get close to clearing the bar of proof that Pfizer is crafting the next potential global pandemic so they can sell us vaccines.
So I peel off to see how the conversation is unfolding online.
My initial questions are pretty similar to everyone else's.
Is he for real?
Does he really have such a senior role at Pfizer? (Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations - mRNA Scientific Planner is the claim)
Might it be Project Veritas who's really been stung by a full-on liar?
Here's what I 'learn'.
Yes, he worked for Pfizer.
So far, so good.
He isn't a scientist. He's a business type. He seems to have come to Pfizer from Boston Consulting Group.
That figures.
He has spilled the beans on how evil Pfizer is.
Hmmm. He's said some things about things that he says have been thought about at Pfizer, so I'm not sure about that.
He's a plant by Pfizer to get Project Veritas and vaccine sceptics excited, so that they can be humiliated when the guy is proven to be a fake Pfizer executive. No, it's Project Veritas that you have to be suspicious of because of its links with Israeli intelligence.
I'm not going down those rabbit holes. [Example here}.
Google and the mainstream media are suppressing the story.
Hmmm. I'm reading all about this thanks to Google. But it's certainly true that there's nothing on any mainstream news sites. And there's quite a lot more on DuckDuckGo, which seems to have quickly indexed a few more forums and blogs on which it's being discussed.
I'm imagining what kind of editorial call I'd be making on this, if I were still working in mainstream news. It’s not hard.
It's a story. I'd run it. Carefully.
People are reacting to an event that really happened, involving a Pfizer executive, who many people have verified as a real person.
Clearly no one is running it in the leftish centreish information space.2
So the right is going bananas about censorship and correctly predicting that the mainstream media is lining up its ducks to shoot the story down (which, of course, is exactly what does happen after a few more days).
So both sides are right.
On the right, they're correct that a story is being suppressed by mainstream media. And on the centreish/leftish they're correct that the story is a bit crap and doesn't prove anything.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this is just how predictable the unfolding of everything like this always is.
Personally frustrating is that the Pfizer guy has made a point that goes right to the heart of our institutional trust crisis.
The part where he says that the people responsible for regulating businesses often end up working for those businesses is just one of those stone cold facts that everyone who ever pays attention knows.
In the UK there is a fortnightly (and reasonably apolitical) magazine called Private Eye that relentlessly exposes these career moves. That there is mistrust of this layer of 'elite' movers and shakers across the political spectrum would lead you to think that we might find common ground between left and right.
But, no. Because there are narratives to support and both sides are too busy talking to themselves to bother.
As a four-times vaccinated kind of a bit Marxist-ish type of person it's both somewhat amusing and somewhat odd to find myself sympathising so much with the right on things like institutional corruption and the narcissistic qualities of 'elite' discourse, but I guess this just means I'm a 'populist'.
And that is a real issue, because 'populism' has a terrible credibility problem - to be explored here more deeply, soon.
In a way, one of the biggest challenges in this area is the essentially vacuous quality of the most influential commentators in this space.
In the course of following this tiny and inconsequential saga I inevitably find Russell Brand modelling exactly that problem. Which is actively being part of the problem rather than a solution.
This is the intersection of essential truths (because he's dead right about some things) and the cul-de-sac of vague calls to unite left and right against institutional corruption.
Of course, there's good money to be made in pointing out the same perverse incentives and structural problems day after day, but no one in the comments seems to care about actually doing anything about this.
Brand is perhaps the epitome of the false prophet. Selling the comfort of knowing that you're onto them and thus helping to chip away at public confidence in institutions, while organising *nothing*, making *no* attempt to fix the problem.3
Unfortunately, while Brand is banging on about the obvious incentives of maintaining a status quo that doesn't serve the best interests of the rest of us, I'm distracted by wondering how much money he gets from stringing some words together day after day with this anarcho-lowermiddlebrow shtick.
No wonder Freddie deBoer goes on so much about how the left forgot about organising anything. Doing actual work, beyond ‘content creating’ and tweeting all the time.
So, there you have it. An ultimately disappointing and inconclusive, mainly online, furore comes and goes. With grains of truth at the heart of it that will come to nothing.
Were I Pfizer, the right or Russell Brand at this point I'd be pretty happy. And that's just the way it is.
In passing…
Since it's take pot shots at the right in particular week here at Rarely Certain (my personal version of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) let's talk about a side issue in this mini Pfizergate.
It stems from the glee with which the denouement is reported, wherein Walker (the Pfizer guy) is confronted and realises that his life has just changed.
I won't dignify it with links. It's just vile. But it makes me notice something.
How the very worst in human nature is agnostic when it comes to ideology and political passions.
The right correctly identifies cancel culture as a vindictive, unforgiving, ultimately unjust destruction of lives for committing the crime of having incorrect thoughts. Then celebrates the destruction of a foolish man's life for running his mouth on a date that turned out to be a sting.
You don't have to like Walker and what he represents in the culture (money, money, money, status and showing off) to think that this episode shows the right at its worst. Every bit as vindictive, unforgiving and revelling in the destruction of a man's life as their harshest Woke opponents.
It may be necessary to highlight the worst qualities of identity-obsessed liberal leftishism but never let it be said that their polar opposites are any higher-minded.
Disclaimerish note.
Of course, the pace of online news means that much may already have changed since I last bothered to check this story. Or (effectively the same thing) everyone will think that it’s changed. I see the inevitable Pfizer statement has been released, for example. And that there are lots of debunkings, exactly where you’d expect. But the story itself is just gravy. Another accessory. It’s how stories like this unfold that’s really interesting. Whatever turns out to have been missed, or mistaken, isn’t going to change any of that.
Bonus tangent. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales blocked my Twitter account, sometime around 2019, accusing MikeH_PR of being an antisemite. This seemed to be related to my tweeting positively about the UK Labour Party's objectives for a scheduled General Election. The election was happening during a concerted smear campaign launched against its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, alleging antisemitism. Such was the effect of this campaign that Peter Oborne - a prominent (and principled) conservative journalist who supported none of Corbyn's policy goals - was moved to write extensively about it. Here's a good primer on Oborne's view of that campaign https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/killing-jeremy-corbyn
Actually, there was one early semi-debunk by Newsweek. But it was too speculative and opinion-laden to count as genuine news coverage.
Perhaps Russell Brand's most telling moment came when he once urged everyone not to bother voting at all. Followed by a volte face when it was pointed out how stupid not voting at all is if you want to achieve change. I'll leave the reader to find their own stories about that one. I’ve had quite enough Russell Brand for one day.
I don't know why Russell Brand, manic weirdo, is taken seriously by anyone on any issue.
I read your linked piece on the lack of truck drivers: I find it interesting that the "blame Brexit" crew clearly weren't aware the same shortage was occurring in the US and Australia. And for similar reasons: a generation ago drivers were usually employees of transport companies. Now they are independent contractors, with all the burdens (including owning or leasing an 18 wheeler!). And a culture of "free next day shipping" cutting into any margins.
On the revolving door between regulatory agency and firms, the term "regulatory capture" tends to be used in the US, which is apt.