5 ms·

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

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.

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.