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[ This ] is grossly irresponsible , particularly for a journal specialising in vaccines .
‘ Garbage in , garbage out ’
Scientists quit journal board over article claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill .
By Wade Zaglas
At a time when vaccine hesitancy and misinformation has gathered traction in some circles around the world , it seems unbelievable that a peerreviewed journal would be complicit in promulgating similar mistruths .
But that is exactly what has recently happened .
A group of virologists , vaccinologists and other scientists have resigned from the science journal Vaccines ’ editorial board after a peer-reviewed article concluded that “ for three deaths prevented by [ COVID-19 ] vaccination , we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination ”, the journal Science reported .
Two of the scientists to resign are Katie Ewer , an immunologist at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford who was on the team that developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine , and Florian Krammer , a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai . Both of their resignations were reported on the fact-checking website for science journals , Retraction Watch .
“ The data has been misused because it makes the ( incorrect ) assumption that all deaths occurring post vaccination are caused by vaccination ,” Ewer says .
“[ And ] it is now being used by anti-vaxxers and COVID-19-deniers as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are not safe . [ This ] is grossly irresponsible , particularly for a journal specialising in vaccines .”
Vaccinologist Helen Petousis-Harris , who directs the Vaccine Datalink and Research
Group at the University of Auckland also resigned as a Vaccines editor after reading the paper – titled ‘ The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations - We Should Rethink the Policy ’ – labelling it as a case of “ garbage in , garbage out ”.
Other world-renowned experts in scientific fields , such as Diane Harper , Ann Arbor ( founding editor-in-chief of Vaccines ), Australian Paul Licciardi , and Andrew Pekosz similarly submitted their resignations .
The retracted paper was originally published on June 24 , with resignations swiftly beginning a day later .
“ By early Monday , Fanny Fang , the journal ’ s managing editor , wrote to the editorial board members that Vaccines – a reputable open-access journal launched in 2013 by Basel , Switzerland-based publisher MDPI – had opened an investigation into the paper ,” Science reported .
Fang told the editorial board of Vaccines : “ We are treating this case with the utmost seriousness and are committed to swiftly correcting the scientific record .”
Later on Monday , Vaccines ’ editors published an Expression of Concern about the paper , and on 2 July the paper was retracted .
However , despite the expression of concern and the retraction , Science reported that as of July 1 the misleading paper had garnered the interest of close to 350,000 readers and had been tweeted as ‘ evidence ’ by antivaccination activists with many followers .
Alarm bells should have rung considering none of the authors of the spurious paper are trained in epidemiology , virology or vaccinology .
Science named the authors of the article as “ Harald Walach , a clinical psychologist and science historian by training who
describes himself as a health researcher at Poznan University of Medical Sciences in Poland ; Rainer Klement , a physicist who studies ketogenic diets in cancer treatment at the Leopoldina Hospital in Schweinfurt , Germany ; and Wouter Aukema , an independent data scientist in Hoenderloo , Netherlands ”.
The three peer-reviewers of the article did not provide much criticism . Indeed , one of the anonymous reviewers said not much else about the manuscript apart from that it “ is very important and should be published urgently ”.
“ To draw their conclusions , the paper ’ s authors computed COVID-19 deaths prevented by vaccines by using data from a study of 1.2 million Israelis , half of whom received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and half of whom did not . They estimated that 16,000 people needed to be vaccinated to prevent one COVID-19 death – a measure that is problematic , critics say , because as a vaccine succeeds , the number of people that must be vaccinated to prevent a death grows ever-larger ,” Science reported .
Other flawed methods , data and conclusions also resulted in the backlash against the article .
A day after the article was published , Lareb ’ s head of science and research , Eugène van Puijenbroek , emailed Vaccines ’ editors , lambasting the paper and requesting a correction or retraction .
“ A reported event that occurred after vaccination is … not necessarily being caused by the vaccination , although our data was presented as being causally related by the authors ,” he said .
“ Suggesting all reports with a fatal outcome to be causally related is far from the truth .”
Since the retraction , both Petousis- Harris and Harper ( editor-in-chief ) have rejoined Vaccines ’ editorial board .
“ I am pleased with the way they have handled it so happy to stay on [ the Editorial Board ]. Mistakes were made but they seem to have owned it and followed a rapid retraction process ,” Petousis-Harris said . ■
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