Talk:Robert Clancy (doctor)

Notability

With Relation to the notability banner. This person falls under the Creative professionals guideline (of the general notability guidelines) of someone who is known for originating a significant new concept, theory or technique. (ie broncostat to reduce acute bronchitis).E! (talk) 06:07, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Definition of "False information"

Why is his opinion false information? By labelling as such, you are applying an adjective to someone's opinion. Determining if it is false or not is not the objective of this Wikipedia page. 103.79.255.45 (talk) 11:20, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

See WP:PSCI and WP:VALID. Pseudoscience and bogus claims are called out as such because of policy. It's a Wikipedia feature. Alexbrn (talk) 11:23, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

Robert Clancy's COVID19 misinformation

I reverted User:Hugs72's changes here [1] (along with the later bot edits and then rerun the bot). The changes are not supported by the cited sources. It says he was "misquoted" about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin but no where does he says this, instead he says

I do not know Craig Kelly. There is much he has said that I disagree with, but on the matter of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, he has been right to raise awareness about these drugs and their potential to be effective in the early treatment of the disease.

The opinion actually goes into a fair amount of detail with his completely unsupported views of the benefits of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and claims of shortcomings of the studies which have found they are not beneficial for COVID-19. It's clear he disagrees with Craig Kelly's views on vaccines, but we do not discuss vaccines in any way. It's not clear to me Kelly actually misquoted Clancy about vaccines but if he did it's not something Clancy felt was important enough to address.

The association thing is a case of er what? We do not suggest there is any association between Clancy and Kelly other than that Kelly quoted Clancy. Someone quoting someone else doesn't mean there's any association between them, indeed, the assumption would generally be that there is no association.

As for the Newcastle University thing, it's pure WP:Synthesis as the source is Clancy's university profile. I'm sure it's true, but it's irrelevant unless any reliable secondary sources care about. Note that somewhat similarly to the association between Clancy and Kelly, no where do we suggest that Clancy has lost his status as an emeritus professor. Actually in this case we clearly say the opposite.

Nil Einne (talk) 08:23, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Hey Einne, in a respectful manner, we'll just reply to each of your points in the order you raise them and we are sure that the correct conclusion will be found as the both of us only want the facts. Perhaps we should discuss it before making any further edits so as to avoid ceaseless reverting and so on regarding the paragraph in question? Just a thought and interested to hear your opinion regarding that.

On your first point, perhaps it would be good to get the actual quote/ a reference to the quote? We feel that this is essential as otherwise one might mistake your legitimate point as speculation.

As for the article we included it to support our assertion that Professor Clancy responded to Craig Kelly. We can so no reason why one ought to revert the inclusion of the fact that Professor Clancy responded to Craig Kelly's claims - please enlighten me. On vaccines we made no comment - this is superfluous.

We apologise if we were unclear regarding the association point. We simply thought it harmless to highlight that the extent of the disassociation by Newcastle university was not all encompassing and that he maintains his status as a member of his relevant faculties.

On your discussing of Professor Clancy's emeritus professor status, again this is a flourish without a point. At no stage did we insinuate that you had said anything on the topic.

Finally we must insist on the removal of the phrase "false information" in its current form. Ivermectin is adopted or partially adopted as treatment in the countries listed below, and this makes it accessible to 43% of the global population where Covid-19 mortality rates are not close to zero for the express purpose of treating of Covid-19. The health officials at these regional or federal levels coming to such a conclusion indicates there is no reason to suggest this is "bogus claim" or "pseudoscience" as you say above, but that the scientific world is divided. Thus to be in keeping with what another seems to have raised under the title "definition of 'false information'", as well as with Wikipedia's "Five Pillars" that stress neutrality, we must not present something as "the truth" or as "the best view" but rather "we describe multiple points of view, presenting each accurately and in context" Wikipedia:Five pillars. Hence this unnuanced statement must be altered or removed so as to prevent a readers understanding being (no doubt unintentionally) misled to believe your opinion by the absence of a mention of the wide debate in scientific circles.

• Countries that have approved or partially approved ivermectin: Argentina, Bangladesh, Belize, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Colombia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Slovakia, Thailand, the USA, Ukraine, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Malaysia Hugs72 (talk) 06:08, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

No we do not engage in OR on Wikipedia. So no, we are not going to compare Kelly's quote with that Clancy actually said. Considering Clancy had a chance to address any alleged misquote by Kelly but did not do so, clearly if Kelly did misquote Clancy it's not something even Clancy cares about. And Clancy did not respond to Kelly anyway. His response was largely addressing the response to what Kelly had said rather than a response to Kelly. I don't see any reason to mention his response, especially if it was not discussed in reliable secondary source and there is nothing he said of particularly relevance to what our article says beyond WP:MANDY. You've presented no secondary sources discussing Clancy's opinion piece, there may be none since he didn't really respond to Kelly as you alleged or actually say anything new, instead he largely used it as a vehicle to spread further misinformation, but it was already well known by that time he was a spreading misinformation on the matter so his continuing to spready misinformation was nothing new. And no, we're not going to remove the claim that Kelly spread misinformation since as per reliable secondary sources, that's what he did. This is not the place to discuss alleged benefits of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine either. The only thing that matters to this this article is stuff which are directly relevant to Kelly. The fact that he was strongly criticised for spreading misinformation is relevant, alleged benefits are not. (If he conducted groundbreaking research demonstrating these benefit, then this research would likely be mentioned, but we still wouldn't go into detail about the benefits.) Nil Einne (talk) 07:32, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

Right, we see that this is going to go nowhere. Responding to what Kelly had said is indeed responding to Kelly - that's semantics we know - and in regards to WP:MANDY we suppose it doesn't matter either way. That said, his article is a source on Kelly's claims so could be referenced in regards to what you have already stated. The rest is superfluous as we made no claims about any benefits or negatives of the two figures claims. We suppose your paragraph will be unchanged or, if it is changed, will be changed back, but as Professor Clancy's article is indeed a secondary source on Kelly's comments there is no reason not to cite it alongside your own citation is there? Hugs72 (talk) 08:10, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

But Clancy did not respond to what Kelly said in any significant way. He mostly just responded to discussion about what Kelly said and the criticism of him (Clancy) that had come from Kelly drawing attention to what Clancy had said. And even that was only about half of his piece, the other half was was a vehicle for more misinformation which I guess you could argue is also a response to what people said about Clancy's misinformation but is clearly barely about what Kelly said. In other words, his response could be said to be a defence of himself and his views which were widely discussed after Kelly drew attention to them, but he wasn't significantly responding to what Kelly said. This is the big difference you don't seem to understand. Let's remember, he discussed what Kelly said so little that by your own admission, you still don't know what Kelly said and think we need a quote from Kelly. And no, Clancy is definitely not a reliable source for what Kelly said. While his opinion piece was published in the SMH rather than self-published so may have had some fact checking, the degree of fact checking in opinion pieces is variable and in some cases may only be enough to avoid defamation (which to be fair, is likely to be significantly stronger in Australia than the US, but we don't consider such things and so still consider opinion pieces only suitable for attributed opinion). So we require reliable secondary sources not opinion pieces for any discussion of what someone else said. Opinion pieces can only be used to support statement's attributed to the author, Clancy in this case. But as I said, there's nothing of any real relevance to Clancy's article in that opinion piece that I saw. Clancy's opinion of what Kelly said is mostly neither here nor there. But in any case as I already said the only area in that opinion piece where he actually articulated a disagreement with Kelly was about vaccines but as you yourself seem to agree it's not something we cover or need to cover. And I'd note we don't care about what Kelly said in this article anyway. We only care about what Kelly said when it directly concerns Clancy. Kelly quoted Clancy and this drew attention to the misinformation that Clancy was spreading which provoked numerous responses which we briefly cover. Clancy chose to respond to this furore by spreading more misinformation. He did not claim he was misquoted by Kelly as you initially claimed, or anything of that sort, again he barely address what Kelly had said. And sorry but you can't claim you have made no claims when anyone reading this discussion can see two whole paragraphs are nonsense by you about ivermectin. You are right you barely mentioned hydroxychloroquine although you did claim Clancy's claims about hydroxychloroquine were not pseudoscience or misinformation even though the latter at least, is well supported in reliable secondary sources. (Pseudoscience I'm not so sure but I don't know where that came from since we don't mention that word in our article, you seem to be the first to bring it up.) Nil Einne (talk) 08:43, 3 August 2022 (UTC)