News that Never Was: Healthy (and Unhealthy) Quoting in Uncertain Medical Communication

The contribution focuses on how scientists and practitioners can have a scientifically motivated impact on a public audience of non-expert users via traditional and social media. The research focuses on the lack of authenticity in scientific and professional communication during one of the most controversial Covid-19 vaccination campaigns. The accuracy (or lack thereof) of information about any vaccine circulating in January 2021 is not questioned. Instead, the focus is on the impact of 'vaccine effectiveness' in popular, non-scientific contexts. These campaigns were often supported by arguments distorted by incorrect references and erroneous quotations, even when quotation marks were used. The result is a body of written and oral texts rife with fake news and inaccurate quotations. The corpus includes articles from two national newspapers ("Il Corriere della Sera" and "The Times") published between 14 and 27 March 2021 and containing the keyword 'AstraZeneca', as well as related Facebook posts from the same newspapers, all retrieved via LexisNexis. This corpus is compared with another one of contemporaneous US digital news on the linguistically controversial 'Operation Warp Speed'. The analysis focuses on quotations from experts and scientists in headlines and leads compared with their reporting in body text. The findings show that imprecise and out-of-context quotations are prevalent in headlines, often distorting the original meaning and potentially misleading readers. This highlights the important role that digital, disintermediated communication can play in enabling scientists to convey their messages directly and avoid distortions or misquotations.