How Flawed Research Hurts the Public

Publishing Nonsense

Source: Opper, Frederick Burr, Artist. The fin de siècle newspaper proprietor / F. Opper. , 1894. N.Y.: Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann.

It seems that everyone wants a voice in the flourish of COVID-19 reporting. Open any medical journal these days—or, for that matter, any science journal—and there will be at least one if not many articles on either the vaccines or the symptoms connected to the pandemic.

Exposés claiming that vaccines are killing people are unexpected. If there are any, they had better be correct; otherwise, anti-vaxxers are likely to quickly use the claim as a social media poster of I-told-you-so propaganda.

Because I am one of those voices of COVID-19 reporting, I do get messages from otherwise very intelligent people who read old books on SARS, telling me what to read to convert my byline to anti-vaccination material. I think I have a relatively unbiased mind, though, as we all know, nobody is wholly impartial. However, too often, when I follow someone’s recommended reading, I find either big or small flaws or misunderstandings taken from skewed contexts.

The real problem is that everyone wants to get in on the act, including me. After all, COVID draws a crowd of listeners. That’s partly because, deep down, everyone is frightened and confused about who is in charge and who is an expert. Even the expert experts are still learning, discovering, and changing their beliefs about COVID-19 contagion and morbidity.

Where COVID Science Goes Wrong

Who would believe that a respected peer-reviewed journal such as Vaccines would publish on June 24, 2021, “The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy,” an article claiming, “For three deaths prevented by a vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by the vaccination.” What?!

How could the authors claim that vaccines truly cause two deaths for every three lives saved? First, let’s remember that statistics are never, never-ever, proof that one thing has caused another. All they can say is that the matter should be looked into. Vaccines is a highly respectable journal with soaring subscriptions and submissions, yet it accepted a paper that misinterpreted data and misrepresented the aims of vaccination endeavors.

That article was peer-reviewed and published, but it was hugely flawed by the assumption that every death that occurred near the time of vaccination was because of that vaccination. People die all the time, every day, every hour by coincidences close to the days of their vaccinations from causes that are not apparent to an experienced coroner.

Unfortunately, the results of too many health studies can generate speculations about causes and prevention that end up too quickly in the popular media.

Where the Study Went Wrong

The authors as well as the publication peer reviewers had no specialty expertise of the subject—yet by using data from a study of 1.2 million Israelis, they concluded that it would take 16,000 COVID-19 vaccinations to prevent one death. The problem is that their conclusion was based on data from a registry at The Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre, Lareb, which is a passive system where anyone can file a report after being vaccinated. Lareb uses its data to gather information on early rare side effects for follow-up studies, not for studies of vaccine risk. Lareb called the report “far from the truth.”

We cannot know whether or not the authors knew that their research was flawed. I suspect they did not, and that the cause could be expertise deficiency in gathering statistical information. The point here is that authors should be cautious of the dangers coming from what they submit to highly respectable journals.

The Problems Caused By Mistakenly Published Research

Once anti-vaxxers get a hold of information like that from an otherwise respected journal, it is used “as evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are not safe.” Six editors of the journal resigned in angry protest of the acceptance of the study one week after the paper was published, forcing the article into retraction. But, by then, the damage was enormous. Over 425,000 readers had seen the piece, boosting anti-vaccine propaganda conspiracy theories on social media, making it nearly impossible to rectify.

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Many of my posts stray into subjects new to me. Being just a mathematician with some knowledge of physics and the philosophy of time, what right do I have to write about race, pandemics, and vaccinations? Hardly any. But when I do write about issues that stray from my expertise, I’m careful enough to warn my readers that I am a mathematician and not a clinician, but that I know that humans too often make connections where there may be none. They do so because they unwittingly misuse complex statistics and ignore correlations that are too complex to absorb. They also genuinely have hypothetical reasons for unwittingly aiming toward one of their own conformational biases.

In attempts to find a simple reason for one thing following another, it almost always turns out that there is no single explanation.

For example, take the 226 recorded cases of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscles) or pericarditis (inflammation of the pericardium) reported in the United States by young men between the ages of 16 and 30 just after being inoculated with Pfizer/BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine. With those numbers, the risk factors of being vaccinated against a deadly coronavirus are extremely small. Yet one influential news outlet wrote on its website, “CDC advisors reported that myocarditis cases following vaccination in the 16-to-24 age group were higher than expected.”

All of that might be true since the expected number is less than 100 in that age group. However, myocarditis, along with other odd side effects, is carefully watched and reported. Haphazard talk about side effects coming from news outlets and social media have made us far more watchful for anything that makes us feel different immediately after receiving a Covid-19 vaccination. That would be a rather benign problem if it were not for watching anti-vax propagandists eager to market that information in support of their cause.

Information from the stories we read should be analyzed and verified by our intelligence. The messages we write in a science journal or on social media can have enormous consequences.

© 2021 Joseph Mazur