Scientists quit journal board, protesting ‘grossly irresponsible’ Covid study
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
> ... For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination. Conclusions: This lack of clear benefit should cause governments to rethink their vaccination policy.
Besides the flaws pointed out by the article, the paper also linearizes the effects of vaccines, i.e. they estimate "how many people need to be vaccinated in order to avoid one death on average". This estimate, multiplied with "how many people died after being vaccinated", is how they arrived at their main result cited above. But we also know that the effects of herd immunity and spread are not linear when a significant percentage of the population is immune.
TFA:
> [The paper] makes the (incorrect) assumption that all deaths occurring post vaccination are caused by vaccination
> None of the paper’s authors is trained in vaccinology, virology, or epidemiology. They are: ... a clinical psychologist and science historian by training who describes himself as a health researcher ... ; a physicist who studies ketogenic diets ... ; ... an independent data scientist
> The three peer reviewers on the paper, two of them anonymous, did not offer any substantial criticism of the authors’ methodology in these brief reviews. One of them ... wrote that the authors’ analysis “is performed responsibly … and without methodological flaws … and the results were interpreted with the necessary caveats.”
> One of the anonymous reviewers wrote that the manuscript “is very important and should be published urgently,”
So why not take 15 in Poland instead of 700 in the Netherlands? Any indication the Poles are less trustworthy than Dutch?
Further, get base death rates from fatal causes attributed to vaccine in unvaccinated population. It's rather crucial to do so, because unvaccinated people sitting at homes (not moving enough) can develop clots more often too. Or the opposite.
If that data is insufficient, you can also employ base rates pre-pandemic.
Foremost: If someone had cancer, that does not mean he would have died immediately. Heck, he could have "survived" it, or at least lived for several more years.
Second: This does not explain the huge numbers of deaths. You can easily compare how many people died of/with lung cancer from 2019 to 2020 and then for 2020 to 2021 and clearly see that COVID made a difference here (called Übersterblichkeit in German, and visible in all COVID-affected countries).
And AFAIK most countries do actually not report a death with COVID, e.g. a car accident, as being caused by COVID.
In other words, this is a common myth from the skeptics department and only serves in undermining COVID-related efforts, even if well intended.
Random German state (Bavaria) for example [0]: Cause of death known for 98% of all COVID-19 deaths, 87% of these died from the disease, 13% from other causes. I just don't really see how it's misattribution when that data is available (which I assume it would be in any country not completely overwhelmed by the pandemic).
[0] https://www.lgl.bayern.de/gesundheit/infektionsschutz/infekt...
It's just a matter of timeliness in some cases and up to the consumer of such data to decide which is suitable for which analysis (and honestly a moot point, no country tests enough to warrant the assumption that the odd accidental death that is later corrected would be worse than the effects of undercounting).
[0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
Dude is also a known antivax: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpxwx/how-france-became-the...
Not too surprising when you see where he works ;-).
- "I don't think this is true" - "And AFAIK most countries do actually [...]" - "In other words, this is a common myth [...]"
You present your thoughts, a theoretical anecdote and things you might have read. And based on that you conclude that it is a "common myth"?
If now you have something to add to the points made after "Foremost:" and "Second:" your post could have added something to the discussion as well, instead of just attacking my form.
Your first point depicts a fictional anecdote that tries to prove that terminally-ill patients with a positive COVID-19 test could have lived longer. It's like saying "If someone has stage IV cancer and tests positive for COVID-19, that does not mean he died due to COVID-19. Heck, he could have even died due to multidrug-resistant bacteria"
What's your source? What's mine? What does it add to the discussion to bring up fictional scenarios?
Regarding your second point: Source? How closely does excess mortality correlate with COVID-19? Could there be other causes? We are talking about highly complex situations that need to be thoroughly analyzed.
If you do not have anything to add about the subject, please don't waste anyone's time complaining about form.
Good investigators have always been aware of the limitations inherent in the assumption, but initially other measures based on the official death certificates were simply not available (and in any case have their own complications when interpreting), so people used what was available and cautioned about the limitations the first four times they said anything.
[1] https://archpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
I have three problems with this statement:
(a) I always thought COVID anti-measures including vaccinations are not about death rates but mainly about the "flattening the curve" and protecting our health systems from collapsing, which would result in many more deaths.
(b) Deaths vs. "inflicted": How is this a good comparison? The consequence of death is clear, what does inflicted mean here?
(c) Deaths vs. "inflicted": Are those who barely survived or who have long COVID not inflicted? What's the ratio then?
Last but not least: It is always easy to say this is bad without giving an alternative solution. What's the alternative to vaccinations? Having COVID spread without controlling it? Or having masks and contact reductions forever?
What do you mean? In the absence of vaccines or any reason to believe that a vastly more effective treatment would arrive, masks and lockdowns “flatten the curve” in the sense that they primarily defer disease, not prevent it. (Major exception: if lockdowns actually eradicated COVID, it would be all over. A few countries pulled this off, but this is only a long term solution if it worked everywhere.)
Vaccines, however, assuming they work as well as the measles vaccine, prevent deaths outright. Vaccinate 5% of the population and you will reduce the eventual number of severe disease cases and deaths (and long COVID?) by something around 5%. (Maybe more like 2.5% if efficacy is on the low end.). Vaccinate 95% of the population and COVID will resemble measles: a few localized outbreaks will still occur, but most people will never be exposed, let alone get sick.
What I’m saying is different though. I’m arguing that even if COVID had a 0 death rate but the same hospitalization rate and severity, we’d still be vaccinating everyone. Because we decided to protect our health care system.
I just wanted to note that COVID cannot be eradicated unless we also eradicate it from all animal populations that can carry it, such as cats, dogs, ferrets, fruit bats, gorillas, hamsters, minks, sea otters, pumas, snow leopards, tigers, and tree shrews [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemi...
It's not like there is no effective treatment in case you are infected. After all, we did quite a few clinical trials in the past year, and it's kind of surprising the answer is "let's just do mass vaccinations and nothing else"
That's like saying seatbelts are an alternative to traffic laws.
Many states and health institutions behave as this was the case.
Also they do not seem to correct for age. We started the vaccinations in the Netherlands with the oldest persons, who were already much more likely to die. So the LAREB results are not representative for the entire population. They will give an overestimate of the mortality by vaccinations.
The Israeli study [0] uses a large sample of people over 16. However they explicitly excluded persons bound to their home or were nursing home residents. This will give a low estimate for the effect of vaccination because the sample includes many healthy younger people, and excludes the highly vulnerable ones.
Sadly it's too hard to attribute the deaths via vaccine hesitancy that this paper will cause, so none of the reviewers can get charged with involuntary manslaughter.
We don't want to contribute to vaccine hesitancy, but we also don't want to adopt a totalitarian worldview where any deviation from "yay vaccines!" is tantamount to murder.
Science should be a process where eventually truth wins out. For this to happen scientists need to be able to publish their findings without fear of retribution. They already risk losing funding, they already have poor job security, they already need to meet a quota for papers and citations. Adding more negative incentives on top of this won't do society any good.
The one highly-enthusiastic reviewer is a bit suspicious, but I'd more suspect it was a case of the author recommending a friend as a reviewer (a common practice). But it could also just be by luck they got a person who was negative towards covid vaccinations so wanted to be very supportive.
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/vaccines/instructions
"Reviewer Suggestions
During the submission process, please suggest three potential reviewers with the appropriate expertise to review the manuscript. The editors will not necessarily approach these referees. Please provide detailed contact information (address, homepage, phone, e-mail address). The proposed referees should neither be current collaborators of the co-authors nor have published with any of the co-authors of the manuscript within the last five years. Proposed reviewers should be from different institutions to the authors. You may identify appropriate Editorial Board members of the journal as potential reviewers. You may suggest reviewers from among the authors that you frequently cite in your paper."
Obviously people are supposed to do so ethically, but cabals of friends can potentially hack the process by suggesting each other and working together.
Referees are normally anonymous. But once they start advising to insert some references to some obscure and/or irrelevant articles...
Further, your characterisation of the article as a mere "deviation" is grossly inaccurate: their text is not a honest look at vaccine dangers but rather it maliciously picks data to get the worst result misuse can produce. The only thing they shy away from is outright fabrication.
I recommend you get acquainted with the definition of manslaughter, otherwise you wouldn't complain or object to it after learning the basics of this particular paper and how it's broken logic is being abused as a denialist propaganda tool.
For future reference, here's Cambridge Dictionary's definition of manslaughter:
> the crime of killing a person when the killer did not intend to do it or cannot be responsible for his or her actions:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/manslaug...
I'm an academic mathematician. Your pointing out the name of the journal is an interesting point.
Pop quiz: out of the journals Aequationes mathematicae, Indagationes mathematicae, Inventiones mathematicae, Quaestiones mathematicae, three are mediocre and one is absolutely top-notch. Without googling can you guess which?
MDPI is a publisher that was started recently, has apparently tried to grow very fast, and engages in questionable practices. I peer-reviewed for one of their journals once and had a very negative experience. Never. Again.
They've also started journals with good sounding names. For example there was no mathematics journal with the title "Mathematics" so they started one.
I've instructed my mail client that *@mdpi.com is to go straight to spam. I got invited to be on the editorial board of one of their journals, and I felt no guilt about not responding. Not too surprised to see them publish crackpottery.
My own field is political communication. One of our leading journals is 'Political Communication', which could exemplify any of the above. But another is 'The International Journal of Press/Politics', which should by its name be complete shit and turns out to be excellent.
Certainly this debacle should lower their rating to "low repute journal".
Is the good one Indagationes ?
(Edit: looks likely. I picked it because it seemed the better name)
Yeah, that's the only one whose meaning you can't guess if you don't read Latin. Inventiones, as it turns out.
Seems the Italians kept it around in the original spelling, too.
P.S. Hey, it's English, just barely: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indagate
I also made the mistake of reviewing for them once. It was a very easy review, as the paper (also mathematics) was absolute crap, and I said as much. It was published anyway, and now I'm definitely on a list. My spam box slowly accumulates more and more MDPI emails.
By the same reasoning, how many deaths and illnesses would we attribute to people getting photographed with a mobile device, or drinking refrigerated water - i.e., how many times each day is someone photographed, or drinks cold water, who also falls ill or dies within a week? We'd have to ban cameras and refrigerators...
This entire episode is mostly evidence supporting Einsteins statement that "Two things are infinite, as far as we know - the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
the main problem with COVID deaths is they are counted as COVID deaths when COVID is basically what pushed already very sick people over the edge. Ever wondered why the large majority of COVID deaths were among people with numerous co-morbidities and already in advanced age?
If you want to make that argument you have to make both ways, and not cherry pick the data.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/51956/do-covid-...
One important takeaway is that even “scientists” can be anti-vaxers.
The mistake in paper is essentially a base rate fallacy.
Scientists can also be non-objective pro-vaxxers, not wanting to look critical at anything provax and immediately very critical of anything that smells like anti-vax.
Basically double standards are applied everywhere, on both sides.
And imho this is quite a problem in the current situation.
But, the study counts all deaths after vaccination as vaccination deaths...
As a reference, Belgium counted all non tested deaths as covid deaths. Leading to a 100% overcount ( guessed).
Pretty wrong conclusion of the study because of wrong assumptions, obviously.
So if someone is a heart patient, but they got COVID and their condition suddenly worsened, the death certificate might state the cause of death as heart failure from the existing condition with COVID as a contributing factor.
People who had COVID but died in completely unrelated ways, such as from car accidents, are not counted in COVID death statistics and don't have it listed as a contributory cause in their death certificates.
It does have bias, true, but you can deal with bias. You do pinpoint studies to measure it and use them to correct bigger trends. You compare with the overall mortality change. And once you have an estimation of the bias, you can apply it back to the overall mortality numbers and get a much better result.
Unfortunately, we mostly see one-sided criticism.
Edit: Thank you for downvoting without commenting!
Scientific journals aren't arbiters of Truth, and we don't need to be protected from bad opinions.
Think Sokal affair except this time lives are at stake.
It's not the job of scientific journals to worry about what irresponsible journalists might do with what they publish. Journals should just publish whatever they believe are interesting findings, and if science progresses society wins out in the end.
This is the comment you're praising? May as well just replace journals with blogs if that's the sentiment.
Nobody said that the journal should not have published because it is not interesting. You should instead focus on the given argument of "scientific standards" and the Scientific Method, the implicit rule-set of science (to be fair, you can question that too, but you didn't).
A Journal uses peer review to avoid publishing things that do not conform to a certain base level of scientific standard, e.g. comparing the wrong numbers/things, or ignoring causation vs. correlation, drawing the wrong conclusions, etc. A peer is supposed to flag such things and remind the authors of the flaws.
It's definitely the job of scientific journals to weed out papers that draw strong conclusions — e.g. 2 vaccine-caused deaths for every 3 COVID-caused deaths — based on bad data/assumptions — e.g. every death in a vaccinated individual is a vaccine-caused death. Especially when the subject is a matter of public health during a public health crisis.
They thought they were working for a "good, solid, respectable journal". Turns out their employer wasn't as respectable as they thought, so they quit - not over a disagreement with their peers but over a disagreement over the journal's standards.