![]() The documents were included as part of disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. “Our ability to detect vaccine hesitancy comments is bad in English and basically non-existent elsewhere,” one of the March 2021 reports stated. “Our internal systems are not yet identifying, demoting and/or removing anti-vaccine comments often enough,” the report pointed out.Īdditional reports a month later raised concerns about the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy - which in some cases may amount to misinformation - in comments, which employees said Facebook’s systems were less equipped to moderate than posts. “We have no idea about the scale of the problem when it comes to comments,” an internal research report posted to Facebook’s internal site in February 2021, a year into the pandemic, noted. (FB) documents suggest a disconnect between what the company has said publicly about its overall response to Covid-19 misinformation and some of its employees’ findings concerning the issue. In doing so, it claimed that “more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet.” "In the meanwhile, as we continue to support and encourage research on TB vaccines, diagnostics and drugs, we should dramatically scale up our efforts to provide life-saving TB diagnosis and treatment to every person who needs it.In public, Facebook has touted the resources it has dedicated to tackling Covid-19 and vaccine misinformation, even scolding US President Joe Biden for his harsh criticism of the company’s handling of the issue. Under these circumstances, we have to embark on research with a greater sense of urgency," said Dr Lucica Ditiu, Executive Secretary of the Stop TB Partnership. "It seems we must wait longer than we hoped to have a fully effective TB vaccine. The vaccine was originally developed and investigated by the University of Oxford. This Phase IIb study was sponsored by Aeras and conducted by the University of Cape Town’s South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (SATVI). "This trial also has demonstrated that it is possible to conduct a large efficacy trial among infants in an area with high TB incidence - which will provide the basis for testing other TB vaccine candidates now in the pipeline."įunding for this clinical trial was provided by Aeras, a nonprofit biotech with a social mission to develop TB vaccines, The Wellcome Trust, and the Oxford-Emergent Tuberculosis Consortium (OETC), a joint venture between the University of Oxford and Emergent BioSolutions. For example, as the authors note, further analysis of the data should reveal a great deal about how the body’s immune system protects against TB and what is necessary to develop an effective vaccine," said Dr Mario Raviglione, Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Stop TB Department. "It is of course disappointing that this particular vaccine candidate was not efficacious, but the trial had other important outcomes. The vaccine candidate also did not provide statistically significant protection from infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which was a secondary efficacy endpoint. There were 32 cases of TB among children who had received the vaccine compared with 39 in the placebo group. However, the researchers found an effectiveness of just 17%, which is so low as to be statistically non-significant. The trial, which took place in South Africa and involved 2794 healthy children aged four to six months, found the vaccine was well tolerated, and there was no evidence of any harm to the trial participants. The results of this Phase IIb clinical trial - the first of its kind to be conducted since the BCG was introduced in 1921 - were published in The Lancet today.
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