Monkey pox messaging - 99.897% wrong. Virtually an inverse of Six Sigma quality

Remember back a few months ago we had a brief shining moment when public health experts thought they might have a second chance to redeem themselves after the Covid-19 fiasco with the delightfully named threat of Monkey Pox?   As it turned out, this was not highly contagious, not particularly dangerous, and was highly concentrated in the LGBT community.  It just could not be dressed up as a second Covid coming.

But not before pretty much the same cast of characters made the same mistakes again with declarative statements long on bombast and fear-mongering and short on facts.  But the great American public, having seen this show once, was not taken in a second time.  There was a heavy dose of skepticism and mockery because the quackery was so obvious.

El Gato Malo comes across a small study which reminds us of the nonsense.  From the monkey-business of "online experts" by El Gato Malo.  The subheading is watch as the credentialed class makes a fool of itself on twitter.

The original study is Analysis of tweets discussing the risk of Mpox among children and young people

in school (May-Oct 2022): Public health experts on Twitter consistently exaggerated risks and infrequently reported accurate information by Benjamin Knudsen, Tracy Beth Høeg, and Vinay Prasad.  

 

It is not a huge study with significant rigor but it does supply evidence consistent with impressions at the time.  From El Gato Malo:

remember the monkey pox “epidemic” and all the zika/dengue/ebola gonna come and get you vibes about how it was going to rampage through schools (despite never doing so before) instead of just being an idiosyncratic series of outbreaks almost entirely confined to a few groups of highly promiscuous fellows having male to male sex with large numbers of partners?

it was quite the thing there for a minute before it disappeared from view like so many other flashes in the pan when it failed to live up to billing and refused to spread in schools or really anywhere else. at all. and this is what actually makes this look like a good topic to assess expert opinion with.

so they authors searched twitter for content on monkeypox and schools, because claiming it would spread there was basically a true/false test with obvious accuracy.

From the study:

Results: 262 tweets were identified. 215/262 (82%) were inaccurate and 215/215 (100%) of these exaggerated risks. 47/262 (18%) tweets were accurate. There were 163 (87%) unique authors of inaccurate tweets and 25 (13%) of accurate tweets. Among health care professionals, 86% (95/111) of tweets were inaccurate. Only health reporters, (23/41) 56% of tweets, were more likely to provide accurate information, however this was driven by one reporter. Multiplying accuracy by followers andretweets, Twitter users were approximately 974x more likely to encounter inaccurate than accurate information.

Conclusion: Credentialed Twitter users were 4.6 times more likely to tweet inaccurate than accurate messages. We also demonstrated how incorrect tweets can be quickly amplified by retweets and popular accounts. In the case of Mpox in children and young people, incorrect information exaggerated the risks 100% of the time. 

From El Gato Malo:

Inaccurate claims were 4.6X more frequent that accurate ones and when adjusted for follower count this led to 974X more exposure for false claims.

let that one sink in. if you grabbed a tweet on schools and monkeypox from “an expert” at random on a follower weighted basis, it had a 99.897% chance of being wrong.

truly, the mind boggles. it’s all static no signal. it’s so incredibly wrong and always in the direction of “exaggerating and overblowing risk” that a simple heuristic of “do the opposite of wh

Lots more good material and commentary in his post.

It does leave us with three clear issues.

Nobody should be censoring anything.  When the "experts" are this wrong, this frequently, we need open communication to rectify the inaccurate messaging.

There is a strong tendency towards propaganda from self-interested parties and the State.

There is no negative consequence to the media/academia/state minions when they propagate inaccurate signal and seek to censor accurate data messaging.

We'll have to get around to these issues sooner or later.