Paper's abstract:<p>> ... For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination. Conclusions: This lack of clear benefit should cause governments to rethink their vaccination policy.<p>Besides the flaws pointed out by the article, the paper also linearizes the effects of vaccines, i.e. they estimate "how many people need to be vaccinated in order to avoid one death on average". This estimate, multiplied with "how many people died after being vaccinated", is how they arrived at their main result cited above. But we also know that the effects of herd immunity and spread are not linear when a significant percentage of the population is immune.<p>TFA:<p>> [The paper] makes the (incorrect) assumption that all deaths occurring post vaccination are caused by vaccination<p>> None of the paper’s authors is trained in vaccinology, virology, or epidemiology. They are: ... a clinical psychologist and science historian by training who describes himself as a health researcher ... ; a physicist who studies ketogenic diets ... ; ... an independent data scientist<p>> The three peer reviewers on the paper, two of them anonymous, did not offer any substantial criticism of the authors’ methodology in these brief reviews. One of them ... wrote that the authors’ analysis “is performed responsibly … and without methodological flaws … and the results were interpreted with the necessary caveats.”<p>> One of the anonymous reviewers wrote that the manuscript “is very important and should be published urgently,”
The main problem with the article is that it assumes that all deaths after vaccination are due to the vaccination, which is nonsense. If 100% of the people are vaccinated they would describe all deaths to it.<p>Also they do not seem to correct for age. We started the vaccinations in the Netherlands with the oldest persons, who were already much more likely to die. So the LAREB results are not representative for the entire population. They will give an overestimate of the mortality by vaccinations.<p>The Israeli study [0] uses a large sample of people over 16. However they explicitly excluded persons bound to their home or were nursing home residents. This will give a low estimate for the effect of vaccination because the sample includes many healthy younger people, and excludes the highly vulnerable ones.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7944975/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7944975/</a>
Looks like the paper has been retracted: <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/729" rel="nofollow">https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/729</a>
Discussed here recently:<p><a href="https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/51956/do-covid-19-vaccines-cause-two-deaths-for-every-three-deaths-they-prevent" rel="nofollow">https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/51956/do-covid-...</a>
I think it wouldn’t matter if the authors were trained as immunologists or not had they published a methodologically sound findings. That’s the problem with authority in science right there.<p>One important takeaway is that even “scientists” can be anti-vaxers.
Original paper: <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm</a>
Old people are vaccinated the first. So the misleading numbers will improve.<p>But, the study counts all deaths after vaccination as vaccination deaths...<p>As a reference, Belgium counted all non tested deaths as covid deaths. Leading to a 100% overcount ( guessed).<p>Pretty wrong conclusion of the study because of wrong assumptions, obviously.
Forgive me but isn't this a similar form of "bad assumptions" and so called "4chan level analysis" used to count Covid cases? You can look at the definition of a covid case from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control here <a href="https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/surveillance/case-definition" rel="nofollow">https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/surveillance/case-def...</a>.
Theatrically quitting is performative. Journals publish nonsense all the time and this is widely known, and also inevitable because science is hard. Journals that refuse to publish controversial findings hinder the scientific process by presenting an illusion of consensus. Consensus isn't everything, and contrarian opinions in science are fine, and publishing contrarian research is fine too.<p>Scientific journals aren't arbiters of Truth, and we don't need to be protected from bad opinions.
Title should read “Scientists throw tantrums and quit their positions over disagreement with other scientists”. Why quit your position and not object through the normal channels if you really wanted to inform people? Abruptly quitting just makes you look unprofessional and easily triggered when others present information you don’t agree with.