> ... 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,”
> While the European average is 127 individual case safety reports (ICSRs), i.e., cases with side effect reports, per 100,000 vaccinations, the Dutch authorities have registered 701 reports per 100,000 vaccinations, while Poland has registered only 15 ISCRs per 100,000 vaccinations. Assuming that this difference is not due to differential national susceptibility to vaccination side effects, but due to different national reporting standards, we decided to use the data of the Dutch national register…
So why not take 15 in Poland instead of 700 in the Netherlands? Any indication the Poles are less trustworthy than Dutch?
Or at least take the 127 from the largest sample size. Openly stating "we intentionally altered our sample to fit our desired results" and still getting published is nuts.
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.
> ... 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.
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?
> (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.
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.
> 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
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].
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.
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"
I don't think anyone is suggesting vaccines are the end all-be-all regarding the pandemic. Vaccines are the first line of defense, with treatments being for those who still manage to get sick. These treatments aren't an alternative to vaccines, they are a complement.
That's like saying seatbelts are an alternative to traffic laws.
Many states, such as Spain, are already pretending that COVID does not exist because of their vaccination rollout plan in spite of their rollout plan only recently started vaccinating 40yo with their first dose.
Even with an effective treatment, you would need to (a) either impose strict lockdown rules or (b) accept a meltdown of the healthcare system without a vaccine. What would you choose?
i fail to see any medical system collapse happening anywhere these days and lockdowns have hardly shown any effectiveness as people still gather anyway and nothing is really enforced. Look at LA lockdowns and good luck trying to see where they started and ended if you look at the number of infections over time.
Without going into the debate about this paper, worth noting that the same assumption is made about covid deaths, ie it covers everyone who was diagnosed or was assumed to had covid before their death, even if the person died of terminal cancer. And since hospitals were a major place to catch the virus, I don’t think we can assume that the misattribution of the cause of death is immaterial.
This is a common statement and I don't think this is true.
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.
There might be more serious studies out there, but the abstract in your link says that they selected 26 patients with severe covid and verified that they died of covid. It is a bit circular and certainly not applicable to the countrywide covid stats.
Okay, clinical pathology in hospital settings aside, what country are you talking about? Here in Germany cause of death determination for COVID-19 deaths is part of the data we gather.
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).
Well, in France for instance, this ICU specialist says that 3 patients out of 8 he saw going through the ICU are classified as covid patients because they tested positive but are not in ICU for Covid [1, around 18min into the video]. Now this is one ICU, and not all deaths occur in ICUs, so I wouldn't extrapolate it to national numbers. But it certainly makes me think that covid deaths are over-estimated.
Just because they're tested positive for Covid and later die in the hospital, doesn't mean that the death certificate will state Covid as cause of death.
That may be but it's not necessarily how the covid deaths stats are collected. I believe in the UK for instance, the definition of a covid death is a death that occurred within 28 days of a positive test, irrespective of the cause of death.
There's not one way to collect these stats, see the section "ONS and PHE COVID-19 deaths data are produced in different ways and have different purposes:" in [0] on what the UK gathers how. Neither of which changes the excess deaths resulting from the pandemic.
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).
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.
Again, your argumentation is problematic and therefore hard to argue with.
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.
No, this is not true in general. There are several different ways to count the number of covid deaths, and "had covid, later died" was simply one that was often used at the start of the pandemic of efficiency reasons.
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.
There weren't enough terminal cancer patients dying with COVID-19 to significantly impact the death numbers. The most common comorbid conditions in COVID-19 deaths were high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity.
That's why you need a control. How many people in an unrelated similar sample also died during the period. Though I have no readily available evidence for this, I suspect that people vaccinated vs unvaccinated would be more similar than people diagnosed with COVID vs people undiagnosed.
The main problem with the article is that it assumes that all deaths after vaccination are due to the vaccination, which is nonsense. If 100% of the people are vaccinated they would describe all deaths to it.
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.
I think the important story here isn't that some controversy addicts/anti-vaxxers wrote a bad paper, but that the review process at a journal called Vaccines let trough a 4chan level analysis. And this during a world wide drive to vaccinate everybody no less!
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.
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.
I think this is a fascinating question. There does seem to be an association between 'better' names and higher quality, and I've been wondering why that might be. Older journals have a wider range of available names so choose better? Association only in our heads between the journal quality and its name subsequent to reading the content? (I got your pop quiz completely wrong; would a junior mathematician who hadn't read or heard of any of them think that 'inventiones' was inherently a better name?) Or is a 'better' name likely, ceteribus paribus, to attract better manuscripts - starting a feedback loop that drives it up? I can't help thinking that a journal called 'Mathematics' has to have better prospects than the average questionable new journal.
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.
Gosh, I'm tired of MDPI emails asking for reviews in 10 days, or asking for papers, etc. They are terrible.
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.
I think mostly journals like this claim to be "reputable" based on their impact factor rather than based on any particular claims to accuracy or quality of published research.
> 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?
Is the good one Indagationes ?
(Edit: looks likely. I picked it because it seemed the better name)
Manslaughter for publishing a bad scientific paper? Have you lost your mind?
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.
Manslaughter is not tantamount to murder, that's the entire point of the concept!
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.
For the reviewers? No. But if we find out people in the journal hand picked reviewers likely to pass the papers in order to see it published, well, I'd like to see at least a civil suit against them. That's not science when you load the dice, it's fraud.
Bad reviewers are extremely common. I wouldn't read too much into lazy people not double-checking the stats carefully.
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.
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.
It depends on the journal. Anyhow it is probably useless anyhow because most scientist refer very often to their own work or that of their research group. If you have some knowledge of the research field, it is usually not too difficult to guess who the authors are.
Referees are normally anonymous. But once they start advising to insert some references to some obscure and/or irrelevant articles...
sort of, but many reviewer communities are small enough that you infer the reviewer's identify from the papers they ask you to cite and the argumentation style.
This kind of retribution mindset doesn't help. Will scientific progress increase when we get more lawyers involved? Is that what society needs? No.
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.
> Manslaughter for publishing a bad scientific paper? Have you lost your mind?
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:
In some fields sure, and whenever you have small sample sizes you'll unavoidably have many contradictory results (unless everyone agrees on priors beforehand), but I don't think vaccines is a field with a replication crisis comparable to psychology.
Medicine is absolutely a field full of bullshit papers that misuses methods and statistics. You'd think they would be better than psychology but not really, they are often even worse at math and statistics than the psychology papers. You'd have to go to biology papers to get reliable rigor, they do a lot on vaccines.
'Correlation is not Causation' is one of the most basic modern scientific principles, yet is ignored here by the authors and the reviewers.
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."
I disagree. The main problem is the way they calculate NNTV as if the risk of infection was linear. It's not since there is a positive loop. In the absence of a vaccine, rate of infection grows which in turn increases the risk of infection.
> The main problem with the article is that it assumes that all deaths after vaccination are due to the vaccination, which is nonsense
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.
But that's just easy to verify. We can take the 5-year average and compare that to 2020/2021 deaths. In countries such as Belgium the "excess mortality" corresponds to the reported COVID19 deaths.
I think it wouldn’t matter if the authors were trained as immunologists or not had they published a methodologically sound findings. That’s the problem with authority in science right there.
One important takeaway is that even “scientists” can be anti-vaxers.
True, but a lot of people seem to be missing that this knife cuts very much both ways.
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.
Doctors usually don't know statistics so when they review papers like this they don't see any issue. They do it on paper but not in practice. You see it in most published medical papers, no matter the bias or leaning, but the only time we get up in arms over it is when it supports causes we think are wrong.
Forgive me but isn't this a similar form of "bad assumptions" and so called "4chan level analysis" used to count Covid cases? You can look at the definition of a covid case from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control here https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/surveillance/case-def....
Sometimes it's better to have a consistent yardstick than an accurate one. Noise vs bias. This definition has the significant merit of having a lot lower noise than any clinical definition of a Covid death, where you'd have wildly different estimations from doctor to doctor, let alone from country to country.
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.
One of the main criticisms in counting covid deaths is that any person who died and tested positive for covid was counted as a covid death, regardless of whether covid was the main cause of death.
This isn't the case for any country that I know of. Nearly every country uses the WHO standards for death certificates and related statistics, which can include multiple contributing factors toward death but only if they actually contributed.
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.
Theatrically quitting is performative. Journals publish nonsense all the time and this is widely known, and also inevitable because science is hard. Journals that refuse to publish controversial findings hinder the scientific process by presenting an illusion of consensus. Consensus isn't everything, and contrarian opinions in science are fine, and publishing contrarian research is fine too.
Scientific journals aren't arbiters of Truth, and we don't need to be protected from bad opinions.
It's not journal refusing to publish a controversial finding, but publishing insufficiently reviewed highly flawed paper, giving it high profile exposure.
Think Sokal affair except this time lives are at stake.
Lives are -always- at stake. Everything in science and society is high consequence. Delay approving a good drug? People die. Prematurely approve a bad drug. People die. Every dollar allocated in the wrong place results in people dying needlessly.
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.
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 not the job of scientific journals to worry about what irresponsible journalists might do with what they publish.
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.
Title should read “Scientists throw tantrums and quit their positions over disagreement with other scientists”. Why quit your position and not object through the normal channels if you really wanted to inform people? Abruptly quitting just makes you look unprofessional and easily triggered when others present information you don’t agree with.
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.
To put a different spin on that: it would presumably be bad for a scientist's career to be associated with a garbage journal that publishes dangerous nonsense.
Most medical journals publish a lot of bullshit papers though. The only difference is that this one has political relevance, so in effect politics dictates what kind of bullshit people accepts.
Pretty sure they quit as an act of public activism about some popular political issue. Unfortunately, when scientist are also activists, they can no longer be objective. You don't see mass resignations when other crap papers get published. If it doesn't embarrass them politically, they accept it.
I think it's a combination. Bad papers that reach conclusions scientists agree with will be generally ignored, while bad papers which reach conclusions they don't like will trigger protest. This is especially problematic in fields where individual studies are extremely noisy and meta-analysis is needed to see the truth. Because the meta-analysis then just ends up showing the prevailing bias.
How do you know what’s happening? Because you read a single biased article? Quitting abruptly is not the proper way to handle this. It’s overly dramatic and the author of the article provides a one-sided view that reeks of the corrupt, establishment rhetoric spewing out of the virology community. Note that some of the scientists that quit worked on vaccines and the companies that produce these vaccines may have influenced the production of this article.
This raises for me a serious question, how good "scientists" they can be in their own fields. If they accept the method of cutting corners like this, or pulling data out of whatever, are they able to output trustworthy science in their own papers? I would think rather not, but I also don't know anything else about them.
> ... 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,”