12 ms·

Scientists quit journal board, protesting ‘grossly irresponsible’ Covid study

93 points by adunk 5y ago

aliasEli 5y ago
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. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7944975/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7944975/
- SiempreViernes 5y ago
  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.
  - f6v 5y ago
    If you dig deep enough, many of the peer-reviewed papers are unreproducible.
    - SiempreViernes 5y ago
      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.
      - username90 5y ago
        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.
  - gizmo 5y ago
    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.
    - radu_floricica 5y ago
      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.
      - gizmo 5y ago
        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.
      - unishark 5y ago
        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.
        aj3 5y ago
        Isn't peer review usually blind?
        5y ago
  - impendia 5y ago
    > a journal called Vaccines 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.
    - pmyteh 5y ago
      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.
    - SiempreViernes 5y ago
      Hm, Science describes it as a "reputable open-access journal" which based on your account I now must assume to be low key gloating. Certainly this debacle should lower their rating to "low repute journal".
- toss1 5y ago
  '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."
- aj3 5y ago
  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.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > 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.
  - f6v 5y ago
    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.
    - anonfornoreason 5y ago
      you still get this excess mortality if covid merely brings the deaths forward by 3-6 months.
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      please show me your sources.
formerly_proven 5y ago
Paper's abstract: > ... 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,”
- f6v 5y ago
  > 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?
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    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.
cudgy 5y ago
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.
- soco 5y ago
  Please read the article. There are no "other scientists" involved.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Huh? All were researchers. One was a physicist, and one a data scientist. One of the reviewers was a chemist.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      They may be scientists in their own fields, but in the relevant field they are not.
      - soco 5y ago
        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.
        jjk166 5y ago
        First author is a science historian, and the physicist studies keto diets, I don't think they're used to particularly rigorous academic standards.
        5y ago
f6v 5y ago
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.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  The problems should have been caught by a statistician, not even immunologist. The mistake in paper is essentially a base rate fallacy.
  - username90 5y ago
    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.
- francisduvivier 5y ago
  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.
throwawayswede 5y ago
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-definition https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/surveillance/case-def....
- insickness 5y ago
  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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - _djo_ 5y ago
    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.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  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.
gizmo 5y ago
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.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  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.
  - gizmo 5y ago
    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.
    - dazag 5y ago
      Oh my god, some sense in the platform, most of the people just speak nonsense. How easy is to control people with the most stupid post by a reporter.
      - Cipater 5y ago
        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.
hartator 5y ago
Original paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm
mellosouls 5y ago
Discussed here recently: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/51956/do-covid-19-vaccines-cause-two-deaths-for-every-three-deaths-they-prevent https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/51956/do-covid-...
NicoJuicy 5y ago
Old people are vaccinated the first. So the misleading numbers will improve. 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ramraj07 5y ago
Looks like the paper has been retracted: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/729 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/729
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

93 points by adunk 5y ago

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. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7944975/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7944975/

SiempreViernes 5y ago
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.
- f6v 5y ago
  If you dig deep enough, many of the peer-reviewed papers are unreproducible.
  - SiempreViernes 5y ago
    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.
    - username90 5y ago
      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.
- gizmo 5y ago
  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.
  - radu_floricica 5y ago
    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.
    - gizmo 5y ago
      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.
    - unishark 5y ago
      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.
      - aj3 5y ago
        Isn't peer review usually blind?
        5y ago
- impendia 5y ago
  > a journal called Vaccines 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.
  - pmyteh 5y ago
    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.
  - SiempreViernes 5y ago
    Hm, Science describes it as a "reputable open-access journal" which based on your account I now must assume to be low key gloating. Certainly this debacle should lower their rating to "low repute journal".
toss1 5y ago
'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."
aj3 5y ago
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.
ekianjo 5y ago
> 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.
- f6v 5y ago
  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.
  - anonfornoreason 5y ago
    you still get this excess mortality if covid merely brings the deaths forward by 3-6 months.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    please show me your sources.

formerly_proven 5y ago

Paper's abstract: > ... 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,”

f6v 5y ago
> 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?
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  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.

cudgy 5y ago

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.

soco 5y ago
Please read the article. There are no "other scientists" involved.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Huh? All were researchers. One was a physicist, and one a data scientist. One of the reviewers was a chemist.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    They may be scientists in their own fields, but in the relevant field they are not.
    - soco 5y ago
      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.
      - jjk166 5y ago
        First author is a science historian, and the physicist studies keto diets, I don't think they're used to particularly rigorous academic standards.
        5y ago

f6v 5y ago

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.

AstralStorm 5y ago
The problems should have been caught by a statistician, not even immunologist. The mistake in paper is essentially a base rate fallacy.
- username90 5y ago
  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.
francisduvivier 5y ago
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.

throwawayswede 5y ago

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-definition https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/surveillance/case-def....

insickness 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- _djo_ 5y ago
  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.
radu_floricica 5y ago
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.

gizmo 5y ago

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.

AstralStorm 5y ago
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.
- gizmo 5y ago
  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.
  - dazag 5y ago
    Oh my god, some sense in the platform, most of the people just speak nonsense. How easy is to control people with the most stupid post by a reporter.
    - Cipater 5y ago
      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.

hartator 5y ago

Original paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm

mellosouls 5y ago

Discussed here recently: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/51956/do-covid-19-vaccines-cause-two-deaths-for-every-three-deaths-they-prevent https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/51956/do-covid-...

NicoJuicy 5y ago

Old people are vaccinated the first. So the misleading numbers will improve. 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ramraj07 5y ago

Looks like the paper has been retracted: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/729 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/729

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]