This article comes from WeChat Public Account: Four Corners to (ID: yeyufeibei) , author: Henry, original title: “media Watch | Shuanghuanglian three Xinhua News Agency reported asking”

The masks are sold out, and the alcohol is sold out. Overnight, Shuanghuanglian Oral Liquid was also sold out.

Although just a week ago, an article in the Xinhua Daily of the Jiangsu Provincial Party Committee quoted an expert from the Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention as saying “drinking Shuanghuanglian antiviral oral solution and isatis root” to prevent a new type of coronary Virus-infected pneumonia “is unreliable and has no scientific basis.”

However, the report of “Shuanghuanglian can inhibit the new coronavirus” is still swiping the screen. The earliest news that was reported on social media was Xinhua’s Weibo, with more than 500,000 likes. When I wrote this sentence, more than 800,000 Weibo netizens participated in the Sina video survey, and one quarter of them really tried to buy Shuanghuanglian, although only 50,000 were bought.

Soon, this draft is also in dispute, some claim that this is an official takeaway, and some believe that this is an official levy of “IQ”. Dingxiangyuan said that the adverse reactions of Shuanghuanglian are among the best in medicine. It can also be harmful.

I started learning how to report on scientific research results last year. From a technical perspective, I don’t think this report has passed for three reasons.

Screenshots of the original article, first published by Xinhua Viewpoint on social media

How to suppress?

The first sentence of the draft states that Shuanghuanglian can inhibit the new coronavirus. As a reader, after reading this sentence, the most concerned questions are “how to suppress” and “how should I do”. Regarding “how to suppress”, the original text expands that Shuanghuanglian can “broad-spectrum antiviral” and “improve the body’s immune function”, and long-term research by Shanghai Institute of Medicine has found that Shuanghuanglian has obvious “antiviral effects” on various coronaviruses.

Obviously these two points cannot support the grand vision of Shuanghuanglian against new viruses. We care about scientific research results, but the research process is also important. Looking at the article alone, it is impossible to see whether this conclusion was reached by injecting Shuanghuanglian into infected animals or culturing the infected cells in a certain concentration of Shuanghuanglian. We know that it must not have been obtained by taking Shuanghuanglian for infected patients, because clinical trials are underway at the end of the article. Of course, more experimental methods than I can imagine cannot be ruled out.

The original author states that Zuo Jianping’s team has conducted a number of studies on Shuanghuanglian against coronavirus since 2003. However, the author could have spent a few more minutes searching all the papers published by Zuo Jianping in the database, or using Shuanghuanglian and Coronavirus as keywords, and found that all the Chinese literatures published by Zuo Jianping and Shuanghuanglian were resistant A correlation. A search of the NCBI’s PubMed database showed that none of the Shuanghuanglian studies were related to coronavirus.

We cannot require this reporter to be a domain expert. However, before writing, journalists are at least obliged to understand the research methods, search the team’s previous research results, or at least put in effort to understand. The author apparently did not make such effort.

When you buy Shuanghuanglian oral solution at Tmall Pharmacy, “there is still a chance”

Reader awareness

Ordinary people who are concerned about the epidemic choose to believe this report, probably not because the logic of the article is clear, but because it is an article issued by Xinhua.

And we can’t ask people who read this article to chew on the words and carefully discriminate between “inhibition” and “prevention.” General readers read it through once. The first reaction is that Shuanghuanglian may be effective. The second reaction is probably to open Taobao and start purchasing. With this in mind, journalists are obliged to explain two points to readers in plain language:

  • Confirmed research results show that under what circumstances and for what mechanism does Shuanghuanglian inhibit the new coronavirus?


  • Is it necessary for ordinary people to purchase Shuanghuanglian? Under what circumstances can Shuanghuanglian be used, and what are the possible effects?

    Through the follow-up report of the China News Agency, it can be found that Shanghai Institute of Pharmacy knows nothing about these two questions. A reporter who has a little reader awareness and is able to ask his own questions from the reader’s point of view, I am afraid that he will also verify these two issues with the source, and smash this manuscript. Or, this is not an article written for the general readers.

    China News Agency is a through train Weibo account inquiring Shanghai Institute of Drugs in the early morning

    Interview effort

    This press release is more like a public relations manuscript that was contacted in advance than a multi-party certified press release.

    I do n’t know the operating practices of major Chinese media for reporting on scientific research results, but in general, such reports require at least two sources: one is at least one researcher in the research team, and the other is at least one An industry expert who has nothing to do with research interests. We cannot see any interview effort from this report.

    The article was reprinted with screenshots from the majority of Chinese media after it was posted on the Xinhua Viewpoint Weibo account. Among them, only China News Agency verified with Shanghai Pharmaceuticals in the early morning, and China Business News quoted the professional opinion of an infectious physician after quoting China Weibo ’s Weibo for verification, and most of them directly spread the original text. A reporter from Xinhua News Agency asked whether Shuanghuanglian ’s claim to suppress the virus was accurate. The other responded that it was “not too high,” because “we do n’t want to say too much about scientific things”.

    A small amount of interview effort protects readers from misinformation. However, the author of this article may prefer a copywriting machine that repeats the opposite speech.

    The World Health Organization says that there is currently no specific drug for New Coronavirus (https://www.who.int/)

    Write at the end

    In addition, the reporter needs to consider the funding of the research, the side effects of the drug, the length of the research, and the best way to think logically about the research results: For example, if Shuanghuanglian is really effective, how much do you need to drink? To work? Is it eight glasses of Shuanghuanglian a day, don’t catch a cold during the flu season?

    This article is currently unavailable on the official website of Xinhua News Agency. Of course, the article entitled “No Belief and No Rumors,” argues that Shuanghuanglian prevents the unreliable “NewThe China Daily article can also be seen. In the morning, more media began to revise the reprinted information before. For example, the People’s Daily stated on Weibo that “inhibition is not equal to prevention and treatment” and called for not to buy Shuanghuanglian oral solution.

    But ordinary readers are not obliged to distinguish between suppression, prevention, and treatment; this should be the task of the original reporter, editor, and reprinted editor of the People’s Daily. For reports in the field of scientific research, the task of the media is to build a bridge between the audience and difficult research details, to help ordinary people understand how a scientific research result will change their lives. If journalists don’t understand it themselves, or even make the effort to understand, verify, and obtain the right information in the first hand, how can we expect most ordinary people to make correct decisions in panic situations.

    Just before the complaint was sent out, my friend transferred an article from Nanjing Daily with the title: “NTU team found that honeysuckle and green tea can prevent and control new coronavirus infection.”

    This article comes from WeChat Public Account: Four Corners the (ID: yeyufeibei) , author: Henry