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Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

While this paper looks scary, keep in mind that the journal isn't particularly reputable and that the vast majority of studies find that mRNA vaccines are safe. It's certainly worth studying this (and many more researchers will continue to do so) but not really anything to merit not getting vaccinated.

If you want to confirm any pre-existing belief you may have, you can find fringe papers to support essentially anything.

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That statistics are also weird. Not necessarily wrong, but the article doesn't control for the rate of COVID infection in Israel, which is a major cofounder, and of the three authors one is an ER doc and two are Management professors -- no epidemiologists, public health, or other expertise. They also pick seemingly random periods of time to analyze against each other.

My guess is that a more correctly written paper would have been published in a better journal (maybe even Nature) if it got the same results, but it didn't.

No control for air pollution either, since the time series is confounded by a lockdown-induced drop[0][1] and subsequent rebound. Nitrogen dioxide from vehicles and factories seems to cause an increase in heart attacks within one hour.[2]

[0] https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/03/22/the-bright-side-virus...

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223102...

[2] https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/04/22/air-pollution-expos...

Their formatting of P values look odd to me - although I can’t find the rules for nature. Examples from the paper: P = 0.740, P = 0.224, P < 0.001

From https://www.graphpad.com/support/faq/how-to-report-p-values-...

  Three styles are summarized below:

  P value  0.1234   0.01234  0.00123  0.00012   0.00001
  APA      ".123"  "0.012"   ".001"  "<.001"   "<.001"
  NEJM.   "0.12"   "0.012"  "0.001"  "<.001"   "<.001"
  GP.     "0.1234" "0.0123" "0.0012" "0.0001" "<0.0001"

An example of rules for JMIR, with reasons given for rules: https://support.jmir.org/hc/en-us/articles/360000002012-How-... Disclaimer: I am not an academic and I don’t write papers

Back on topic. A vaccine has risks. Not having a vaccine has risks. What one really cares about is whether one’s (personal or demographic) risks of serious medical issues are significantly decreased by getting the vaccine, or if one’s psychosomatic psychological issues outweigh the medical benefits. We all know this, but unfortunately discussions often seem to get sidetracked and only consider the risk of the vaccine.

It's a nature journal so it's been reviewed.

This is not Nature, it's Scientific Reports, which publishes all sorts of things. Don't let the domain name fool you.

See "controversies": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports

Yes, because we all know wikipedia is a very reliable, non-partisan source.

Yes I’m wondering why these various comments directly challenge this publisher and publication’s credibility? Especially without a substantive explanation since the content is available for this type of dialog. Strange.

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