What a mess. This will further damage trust in science. 1. People who were previously pro-vaccine will take this as evidence that journals are publishing bad p

What a mess. This will further damage trust in science. 1. People who were previously pro-vaccine will take this as evidence that journals are publishing bad papers and peer review doesn't stop it. 2. People who previously had doubts will observe the extreme over-reaction and double standards here and conclude that you cannot actually publish a paper indicating vaccines may be dangerous regardless of what the paper contains. Extreme over-reaction: I read the paper. It is fine, at least by the normal standards of academia i.e. no worse than normal. Once you wade through invalid complaints like "the people who wrote it aren't one of us" you get to the complaint that it's correlational. COVID research is absolutely dominated by correlational studies. In fact this paper was careful to note the correlational nature. As there are no datasets that state causality, forbidding research on these grounds means nobody is allowed to draw any conclusions about vaccine safety at all. Double standards: The standard definition of a COVID death is "any death for any cause within 28 days of a positive test". This is much more lax than the definition the study used and is guaranteed to over-count, for example when the New York Times ran a front page listing 1000 names of people who "died of COVID" and it was discovered the 6th name on the list was a murder victim. Thus the complainants are setting up a rank double standard: "died within X days of a test" is a perfectly reasonable criterion but when someone uses "died within X days of a vaccine" that is atrocious pseudo-science that must be retracted immediately. I am in the second camp. Given the nature of these complaints, the contents of the paper in question and the mass resignation of the board, it's clear that the vaccine side effect registries run by national governments are at the moment completely useless. There's no actual way to publish research based on them without having your paper retracted, and retractions are happening for ideological reasons dressed up as concern for good science.