Garbage in garbage out, anti-vax edition

Friend of the blog Michael Hiltzik has a piece on the retraction of a junk science paper that would be funny if it wasn’t so disturbing (tbh it’s still pretty funny):

Back in January, an academic study gave heart to critics of COVID-19 vaccines by estimating the number of U.S. deaths from the vaccines at 278,000.

That was a bombshell, if true. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited only 19,476 reports of deaths after COVID vaccination in a national database of unverified adverse reactions to the shots.

Since even that surely inflated figure, which reflects an unknown number of deaths from unrelated causes, amounted to less than three-thousandths of a percent of the 672 million doses of COVID vaccines administered in the U.S., the CDC properly judged the shots “safe and effective” and severe post-vaccine reactions “rare.”

Yet the study, by economist Mark Skidmore of Michigan State University, was taken as gospel truth by a legion of anti-vaccine activists.

And why not? It had been published in BMC Infectious Diseases, a peer-reviewed medical journal associated with the Nature publishing group, which lent it a gilt-edged luster. Indeed, it ranked as the most-viewed paper in the journal’s history.

See if you can guess what happened next!

Now take a deep breath. BMC Infectious Diseases retracted the Skidmore study on Tuesday, specifically citing doubts about “the validity of the conclusions” related to death statistics because of flaws in its methodology. Skidmore disagrees with the retraction.

Lets glance at the “methodology” at work in this train wreck:

Superficially, the study was aimed at determining the factors that led people to be more or less amenable to taking a COVID vaccine. Based on an anonymous database of 2,840 respondents compiled by a third-party survey firm, Skidmore found that people who knew someone who had a serious bout of COVID illness were more likely to get vaccinated, and knowing someone who appeared to have suffered a post-vaccination injury was associated with being less likely to take the shot.

OK, and?

As far as that goes, it’s not especially surprising. But Skidmore went further. He extrapolated from the number of respondents who said they knew someone who had died from the vaccine to conclude that the number of U.S. vaccine-related deaths “may be as high as 278,000.”

I’m saddened to report that one of the victims of this epidemiological holocaust was my Canadian girlfriend.

Hey, so how did this happen exactly? This is how:

The journal editor, Gonzalez Lopez, had also raised a question with Skidmore about Catherine Austin Fitts, whom Skidmore had identified as the source of funding for his survey. Gonzalez Lopez noted that Fitts “has made regular statements regarding COVID-19 vaccination and is a former politician,” and therefore her role should have been “disclosed as a conflict of interest.”

In fact, Fitts is known as a critic of COVID vaccination. She’s a financier and former housing official in the George H.W. Bush administration who has promoted the anti-vaccine campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a review of Kennedy’s 2021 book attacking Anthony S. Fauci, who recently retired as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, she wrote of Fauci — a common target of anti-vaccine fanatics — that “Anthony Fauci and his colleagues are guilty of crimes against humanity.”

According to a 2021 article in the Washington Post, Fitts appeared in an anti-vaccine video asserting falsely that “the coronavirus vaccine is ‘full of these mystery ingredients’ and will ‘modify your DNA and for all we know make you infertile.’”

Skidmore refused to augment his disclosure about Fitts’ role. “I have appropriately acknowledged Catherine Austin Fitts as the source of funding for the survey,” he told the editor. “Accordingly, I do not consider non-competing financial interests to exist.”

This is kind of like how Clarence Thomas doesn’t think that accepting enormous numbers of super valuable gifts from a billionaire doesn’t create a financial conflict of interest, unless said billionaire literally has a case before the SCOTUS.

There’s a bunch more stuff in Hiltzik’s article about the perils of “peer review” — I’ll have more to say about this in another post — and the specific absurdities at the core of the most cited most viewed article in the publishing journal’s history. [ka-ching!]