Giving credibility where credibility is due: Dangers of using university names as "street cred"

Today I was unnerved by the following headline on my social media feed:

"John Hopkins Scientist Reveals Shocking Report on Flu Vaccinations"

As scientists, often we are introduced by the university or institution we are affiliated most closely with.  This signals to the public that we are knowledgeable individuals who are trusted enough by other scientists to work at (hopefully) prestigious institutions, and therefore we know what we are talking about.  As an individual, being affiliated with a large, well known, well trusted institutions that put out high impact, peer reviewed work will transfer some of that trust and positive feelings the public holds for the institution to the individual.  However, it is not always the right signal, and using affiliations to get the public to trust someone who is pushing an agenda can be dangerous.  This is a great example of that.  The article was published in YourNewsWire.com, which I could right away distinguish as not top of the tier journalism or news.  However, when I read the article, it was quoting a paper published by this scientist in The British Medical Journal.  When I followed the link, I was directed to the BMJ website, but was not given access to the article.  This poses another problem to the public, if these scientific journals are all private access, how does someone go about and read the research and evidence in order to draw their own conclusions?  It is a very frustrating position, and leads to people believing whatever snippets they find in the media that gives them free access.  What most people would not have noticed, and even I did not, was that this was published under the BMJ's "Features" section.  This is a subheading of "News and Views", which means that this was a opinion piece, and not a research project.  However, because it was published in a medical journal, any other person can cite it as solid scientific evidence, while in fact it is one scientists opinion.  My next course of action was to dig into who this scientist was and his affiliation with John Hopkins.  John Hopkins is a incredibly well known medical research university that is known as a very credible source to just about any person with a average knowledge of scientific institutions.  I was immediately wary when Snopes was one of the top hits on google.  Many of his arguments have been refuted previously, or are known not to be true.  These include that the flu vaccination doesn't work, because scientists can't always guess the virus correctly, which a 40 year spanning study has demonstrated is not true [http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/153/abstract].  It also includes that "Big pharma" profits from vaccinations, which has been demonstrated to be false [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19948579].   The final argument was that the side effects are higher than claimed, because of high doses of mercury, which is no longer used in vaccinations, and seems to stem from a misunderstanding of the difference between ethylmercury and methylmercury [CDC-thimerosol facts].  The most frustrating thing is that all of the articles refuting the opinion given were research papers, peer reviewed and published, and that the general public would not know that the article in question was not research based, but an opinion piece.  The author himself, Peter Doshi, received his Bachelors from Brown University, his Masters from Harvard, and his PhD from MIT, and is now doing postdoctoral research at John Hopkins.  This sounds like a impressive resume, and even I would be inclined to trust this persons opinion based on the prestigious universities he attended.  

       But.....here is the kicker.  His bachelors was in anthropology, his masters in East Asian Studies, and his PhD in history, anthropology, and science, technology and society.  In direct conflict with what people have labeled him (Including journals such as Science) he is not a epidemiologist.  He is not involved in clinical research, medical research, he does not even have what most would consider a Life Science background.  However, because of the elite institutions that he has been involved in for east asian studies, suddenly we can trust him as a flu vaccination expert.  While it appears he is involved in some beneficial work on getting clinical trial information public (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/business/breaking-the-seal-on-drug-research.html?pagewanted=all), he doesn't have a background in epidemiology.  So, when he makes arguments that the flu doesn't kill as many people as the CDC says, is it because he doesn't know that influenza deaths are not reported to public health authorities, or is there more to this story?  While I agree that there needs to be public records of clinical trials to create transparency and prevent corporations from cherry picking trial results.  However, just because the author is affiliated with prestigious universities does not make him a expert on flu, and opinion pieces should still be regarded as such even in a medical journal.  

You can find the article here:http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f3037

-Jocelyn Cuthbert