Screenshots continue to be lazy and problematic

I’ve mentioned for years that the trend of sharing screenshots of articles (instead of links to the article) is very problematic, and I recently saw the perfect example.

I saw an article being shared around on Facebook that only had this screenshot for reference:

In one case, I saw over 10,000 comments on the article, with the overwhelming majority coming from people who were absolutely sure that it was caused by the COVID vaccine. Here is a quick slice of some of them:

Without even getting into the science of vaccines, all of these people are 100% wrong — because they didn’t bother to find the article before commenting.

Why?

If you do a simple Google search to see what this study was about, you quickly find this line:

The study, led by the University of Melbourne, analysed government data on all diagnoses of bowel cancer (also known as colorectal cancer) in Australia from 1990–2020.

In other words, the study was over before the first COVID vaccine was released, and therefore i t is impossible for the vaccine to have caused a single case of…