Is this paper shady or were the things the paper talk about shady?

April 19, 2024 12:37 PM

Currently having trouble making sense of this paper I was sent by someone I respect. But I'm not so sure I trust the TLDR version source they heard before reading it. It's about the COVID vaccines (which I've supported) and has been retracted, but the authors are standing by what they said. Got some major ADHD/stress brain fog going on and I'm needing some guidance:

How would I go about finding out if there is anything that directly disputes this paper and/or researching the validity of claims made therein? Does anyone have a reputable source explaining the reality? How concerned should I be by this?

posted by Saucy Possum to Science & Nature (12 answers total)

I checked my favorite scientific blog Retraction Watch and they have an article about this retraction.

Here are the reasons the publisher decided to retract the article:

We find that the article is misrepresenting all-cause mortality data

We find that the article appears to be misrepresenting VAERs data

The article states that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine saved two lives and caused 27 deaths per 100,000 vaccinations, and the Moderna vaccine saved 3.9 lives and caused 10.8 deaths per 100,000 vaccinations, though there does not appear to be convincing evidence for this claim.

Incorrect claim: Vaccines are gene therapy products.

The article states that vaccines are contaminated with high levels of DNA. Upon review we found that the cited references are not sufficient to support these claims.

The article states that SV40 promoter can cause cancer because SV40 virus can cause cancer in some organisms and inconclusively in humans. However, we find that this is misrepresenting the cited study (Li, S., MacLaughlin, F., Fewell, J. et al. Muscle-specific enhancement of gene expression by incorporation of SV40 enhancer in the expression plasmid. Gene Ther 8, 494–497 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.gt.3301419

The article states that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines did not undergo adequate safety and efficacy testing, which the journal considers to be incorrect

The article incorrectly states that spike proteins produced by COVID-19 vaccination linger in the body and cause adverse effects.

posted by muddgirl at 12:58 PM on April 19 [28 favorites]

I would not be concerned by this. If you just look at the authors' backgrounds, they are not credible. None are MDs or PhDs. Most list their affiliation as "Independent Research" (i.e. they are not in academia or involved in a research lab); one that doesn't lists "Truth for Health Foundation," which promotes ivermectin as a COVID treatment. They are known spreaders of COVID misinformation. Several of them also promote the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism.

Cureus is not a serious medical journal. They focus on publishing papers quickly rather than ensuring they are quality papers. The publisher says they rely on post-publication reviews to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is frankly irresponsible. They also let the writers pick their own peer reviewers, which is simply ridiculous, because you can pick someone who you know agrees with you.

You can read the full debunking right here if that is helpful.
posted by rednikki at 1:00 PM on April 19 [25 favorites]

Clarifying my comment, I believe the decision to retract was made by Springer which now owns the journal Cureus. So the people who decided to retract the paper may be different from the original editors who decided to publish the paper. In general a publisher unilaterally deciding to retract a paper against the wishes of the authors is taken very seriously and is not done lightly.
posted by muddgirl at 1:04 PM on April 19 [7 favorites]

Of course the authors are standing by the paper. It's designed to damage confidence in vaccines.

The goal isn't accuracy, good science, or even adequate research, it's about publishing something anti-vaxxers can point to in "a journal" and claim as evidence they're right. Spoiler: They're wrong.
posted by yellowcandy at 1:14 PM on April 19 [11 favorites]

They are loons .
It's nonsense

The one "doctor" is affiliated with something called Truth for Health Foundation.
What a rabbit hole that is.

Threats to Your Freedom: THE US BORDER CRISIS

Medical Connections with 5G EMF Exposure, COVID Illness, and the COVID Shots

Democracy vs Constitutional Republic
posted by yyz at 1:16 PM on April 19 [9 favorites]

Yes, muddgirl beat me to it. Cureus is a garbage low-impact-factor journal, and nobody on that paper is objective or has the expertise to do this. Journals often ask authors for a list of potential peer reviewers, so I suspect they had some of their like-minded associates do the deed. I have friends who are scientists at both Pfizer and Moderna, and while the SARS-CoV2 mRNA vaccine technically made it to patients in less than a year, they had been working on the safety of the platform for other applications (cancer, etc.) for many years. So saying it happened in 9 months is completely disingenuous, which I would expect from this group of folks with a clear axe to grind. This is just one of the more glaring examples of uncharitable interpretations of data.

Do you always find new adverse events when you scale administration up from animals to people, and from a few thousand people to a few million? You bet your ass. 100% of the time. There are underlying conditions, genetics, polypharmacy, and the like. But these people seem to conveniently forget that we were in an EFFING GLOBAL PANDEMIC that was killing millions of people in a horrifying and gruesome way.

Ignore this dross. As an informed society we can and should talk about vaccine adverse events but in a more scientific way. Nothing is without some risk, including getting in your car to go to the grocery store. Vaccines are a miracle. Source: I have a PhD and do biomedical research.
posted by SinAesthetic at 1:22 PM on April 19 [7 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you all tons! I figured that had to be the case, but I am very glad to have it confirmed and have links to back it up.
posted by Saucy Possum at 1:22 PM on April 19 [3 favorites]

If you would like a more scientific way to push back against your friend regarding the paper itself: they graph raw VAERS data and conclude from only this data, "After dose two, there was a five-fold increase in myocarditis cases among 15-year-old males." From the VAERS site: "Anyone, including Healthcare providers, vaccine manufacturers, and the public can submit reports to the system. While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness." (emphasis mine)

Basically, VAERS is a reporting system for anyone who thinks they may have personally experienced or have witnessed a vaccine-related adverse event (AE), not a data tracking system of actual AEs that actually are caused by the vaccine. They misrepresented VAERS data and drew an unsupportable conclusion from this misrepresentation.
posted by holyrood at 1:51 PM on April 19 [3 favorites]

For one, the corresponding author has an entire section of FactCheck devoted to him. Many links therein address your other questions. Happy reading.

How concerned should you be? I think the main problem to worry about is your friend's information filter and/or propensity to believe and spread pure baloney. This is not a person to trust.
posted by Dashy at 3:02 PM on April 19 [4 favorites]

I came across the same study and had the same questions. The short answer is, it's complete hot garbage.

The FactCheck article about this study (linked on the page Dashy mentions) is a good summary of the numerous problems with the article. A couple of short excerpts

[Author] McCullough still recommends treating COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, even though both have been shown not to work against the disease. . . .

"[T]he McCullough, Kirsch, etc. Cureus paper that is purportedly a scientific review article references trialsitetnews, epoch times, brownstone, the spectator, children’s health defense, and conservative review as primary sources for some of their points, as well as 11 substack articles/blogs, a youtube/twitter video, and 2 explicit anti-vaccine books, plus a large number of self-citations from the review authors,” Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics in the department of biostatistics, epidemiology and informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, wrote . . .

In case you are not intimately familiar with the right-wing-nut-o-sphere, every one of the sources he mentions here ("trialsitetnews, epoch times, brownstone, the spectator, children’s health defense, and conservative review") are rabid right-wing disinformation sites.

Just for example MediaBiasFactCheck.org writes:

Overall, we rate TrialSite News a strong Pseudoscience source

posted by flug at 3:28 PM on April 19 [1 favorite]

Retraction Watch is a goldmine. Thanks, muddgirl.

Saucy Possum, if your respected contact sends you any more anti-vax nonsense, you might care to recommend that they add The Doctor Who Fooled The World to their reading list, as well the hbomberguy video based largely on it.

Just be prepared for them to take that recommendation as a personal affront. Conspiracy theorists often react very badly to painstakingly researched journalistic accounts of actual conspiracies, especially those involving their heroes.
posted by flabdablet at 5:40 PM on April 19 [3 favorites]

Conspiracy theorists reacts violently when being labeled conspiracy theorists. They consider themselves truth elitists, even though their truth is only in their own heads. The truth is they "need" to believe due to three reasons epistemic (understanding one's environment), existential (being in control of the same environment), and social (maintain positive image of self and social group). If you bust their theory, it destroys their need, and they react violently to that, no matter what the truth is.
posted by kschang at 10:51 PM on April 19 [3 favorites]