A terrible academic paper has fueled renewed anti-vax journalism - it must be retracted, 2024, Pagel and McDonald

[Trish]

Substack article by Christine Pagel
Link to Substack post

Guest post: A terrible academic paper has fueled renewed anti-vax journalism - it must be retracted
A debunk and a plea for retraction from actuary Stuart McDonald

A paper was published in BMJ Public Health that has led to dangerous renewed vaccine deaths conspiracy theories. The actuary Stuart McDonald did a brilliant thread yesterday debunking the paper and has given me permission to share it with you as a Substack post. I think it’s important that his analysis reaches as many people as possible!

Guest post by Stuart McDonald
I’m late to this but I wanted to set out some thoughts on the awful BMJ Public Health excess deaths article. Commentary has focussed on media coverage, linking deaths to vaccines, but I want to discuss the article itself, which should not have been published in its current form.

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The BMJ article criticised here is:
Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ estimates of January 2020 to December 2022

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This critique details plagiarism, misinterpretation of data and terrible newspaper reporting.

It ends:

In summary:

- excess deaths in 2020-23 strongly associated with Covid waves

- highest excess deaths are in least vaccinated countries and vice versa

- excess deaths much lower in 2023

- article has no new findings and provides no evidence to link excess deaths to vaccines harms.

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Stuart and I and many others believe that BMJ Public Health need to retract this paper ugently. The selective plagiarism alone calls for it, but with the added unsupported implications fueling the anti-vax movement, surely the case for retraction is incontrovertible

 

[forestglip]

Link to Substack post

 

[Trish]

Oops, thanks, I'll add the link.