Hiltzik: The return of an anti-vax claim on COVID vaccines

The article published by the respected British Medical Journal earlier this month was eye-opening, to say the least. The study questions why excess mortality in Western countries remained unusually high during the COVID-19 pandemic, even after the introduction of vaccines in 2021.

The implication seemed clear: rather than reducing cases and deaths, COVID-19 vaccines had powered the tragic tide.

This discovery was picked up within 48 hours by the Telegraph, a conservative British daily. The day later, he flew across the Atlantic Ocean to the New York Post, part of Murdoch’s media empire.

Since then, it has been widely distributed on social networks by the anti-vaccination camp. The rehearsals became increasingly feverish, with some tweets blaming vaccines for tens of millions of deaths.

Here’s what you need to know: There is no truth to this finding, nor to the anti-vaccine camp’s interpretation of the BMJ paper.

The journal, which published the article on its public health web page on June 3, acknowledged this. In a public statement released on June 6, after this misinterpretation began to spread around the world, the journal observed: “Various media outlets have claimed that this research implies a direct causal link between COVID vaccination- 19 and mortality. This study does not establish such a link.

On the contrary, the newspaper writes: “Vaccines have, in fact, been instrumental in reducing severe illness and death associated with COVID-19 infection. »

Alas, the newspaper’s warning came too late. As I write, the Telegraph’s June 4 tweet touting its misleading story has received 1.5 million views on X (formerly Twitter), but the BMJ’s warning, only 388,000 views.

These figures are concrete proof of the old belief (attributed to Winston Churchill, among others) that “a lie can travel half the world before the truth can make its way.”

Some researchers say the original paper, written by a team of Dutch scientists, was so poor and inconsequential that it shouldn’t have been published at all.

Among the critics is Ariel Karlinsky, an Israeli economist and statistician whose data made up the bulk of the Dutch paper. Karlinsky wrote that the BMJ should remove the journal and “open an investigation into what happened there with the editors and reviewers.” The newspaper did not respond.

Anti-vaccine propagandists’ use of the BMJ paper highlights the dangers of misinformation for public health today.

A recent study in Science analyzed the impact of what its authors called “vaccine skeptical” published content on vaccine refusal. The authors examined anti-vaccine posts on Facebook during the first three months of the COVID vaccine rollout in early 2021.

They found that posts flagged as false by third-party fact-checkers received only a relatively small 8.7 million views during that period. Posts that were not flagged by fact-checkers but nonetheless “implied that vaccines were harmful to health – many of which came from credible mainstream media outlets – were viewed hundreds of millions of times.”

The flagged messages were more likely to inspire resistance to vaccines, the authors wrote. Although the unreported posts individually had less impact on opinion toward vaccination, the volume of these posts was so immense that, cumulatively, they did more damage to vaccination rates.

A single vaccine-skeptical article in the Chicago Tribune – headlined “Healthy Doctor Dies Two Weeks After Receiving COVID Vaccine; CDC is studying why” — has been viewed by more than 50 million users on Facebook, more than 20% of the platform’s user base in the United States. This was “more than six times the number of views of all reported fake news combined.”

It is also true that articles that may be innocuous or inconclusive in their essence can be distorted and amplified into explicitly anti-vaccine messages through the anti-vaccine network.

Something like this happened with the BMJ journal. His language alluding to “serious concerns” about the impact of vaccines and “containment measures” such as containment of excess deaths was transmogrified into the Telegram headline stating that “Covid vaccines may have contributed to Fueling Rising Excess Deaths” and similar language in the New York Times. York Post.

The anti-vaxx camp, in repeating these claims, did so after removing or downplaying most of the qualifying terms. The title of a report released by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, stated that COVID vaccines “likely fueled an increase in excess deaths,” attributing that conclusion to “media General public “.

The CHD report cites a blog post by anti-vaxx campaigner Meryl Nass, republishing the Telegraph article. Nass’ message was titled “The Dam Has Broken,” suggesting that mainstream news sources were now accepting the dangers of COVID vaccines.

Nass, by the way, is a Maine doctor whose license was suspended and fined $10,000 for prescribing patients ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, two drugs known to be useless in the treatment of COVID-19.

Put it all together, and the BMJ paper’s evolution into a brief claiming that COVID vaccines are harmful to health plays into the most extreme anti-vaccine misinformation in circulation – like Joseph Ladapo’s incredibly ignorant and dangerous recommendation, the anti-vaccine. – a vaccine quack named Florida’s surgeon general by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that no one under 65 is taking a COVID vaccine.

The medical and immunology communities have overwhelmingly concluded that COVID-19 vaccines have significantly reduced hospitalizations and deaths from the disease. A December 2022 Commonwealth Fund report concluded that after two years of administration, vaccines had prevented more than 18 million additional hospitalizations and more than 3 million additional deaths.

This is progress jeopardized by the torrent of anti-vaccine propaganda spread by RFK Jr.’s organization and other opponents of vaccination.

This brings us back to the BMJ document and its obvious flaws.

“Excess mortality,” the measure purportedly examined by the Dutch authors, is simply the number of deaths in a country in a given period beyond those that would have been expected “under normal conditions,” over the basis of historical models.

In more than 40 Western countries, during the peak three years of the pandemic, the authors reported, there were 1.033 million additional deaths in 2020, about 1.26 million in 2021 and 808,000 in 2022.

The authors expressed puzzlement as to why excess mortality actually increased in 2021, despite the arrival of vaccines and the implementation of anti-pandemic social measures, and remained high the following year. “Government leaders and policymakers,” the authors write, “must thoroughly investigate the underlying causes of persistent excess mortality. »

The authors further commented that “consensus is also lacking within the medical community regarding concerns that mRNA vaccines may cause more harm than initially anticipated.” This is a gross misrepresentation.

The consensus within the medical community is undoubtedly that vaccines are safe and effective. Although they cause occasional side effects (like all vaccines), the health threats caused by COVID-19 itself are infinitely more dangerous.

The truth is that the factors causing high excess mortality throughout the pandemic are not mysterious, but well understood. Statistical data scientist Jeffrey S. Morris of the University of Pennsylvania has pinpointed some of the most important ones.

The first is that many more people were exposed to COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020. At the end of 2020, according to the World Health Organization, there were about 10,000 cases and about 238 deaths per million inhabitants; a year later, there were 35,186 cases and 683 deaths per million. Additionally, the COVID variants that emerged in 2021 – the Delta and Omicron waves – were much more transmissible and virulent (causing more hospitalizations and deaths) than the initial variants.

Also in 2021, many of the stricter anti-pandemic measures implemented in 2020 – school closures, lockdowns, business closures, mask mandates – have been lifted by local authorities. This has increased the level of exposure to the virus among the general public.

When it comes to vaccines, the Dutch authors seem to assume that vaccination happened as if it were a switch in January 2021. Of course, this is wrong.

Figures compiled by independent statistics center Our World in Data — which were used by the Dutch researchers — show that vaccines were rolled out only gradually through 2021. By mid-year, only about 20%. of the population of countries that submitted figures had received even a single dose; at the end of 2021, almost 50% were still not vaccinated.

“Even with a 100% effective vaccine, we would have seen high levels of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 in 2021, leading to a high number of excess deaths,” observes Morris.

Statisticians have shown that the peaks and troughs of excess mortality during the pandemic coincide almost exactly with the emergence and peaks of Delta, Omicron and other variants of concern, indicating that excess deaths are almost certainly the result of COVID, not anti-Covid vaccines.

Another data point: as British actuary Stuart McDonald points out, of the 47 countries studied by Dutch researchers, the 10 with the lowest excess mortality rates are those with the highest vaccination rates, as the Canada (83% vaccination rate in 2022 and only 5% excess deaths in 2020-22) and Germany (76% vaccinated and 6% excess deaths). In contrast, those with the lowest vaccination rates tend to have the most excess deaths, including North Macedonia (40% vaccinated with 28% excess deaths) and Albania (45% vaccinated, 24 % excess deaths).

Is there a cure for bullshit like the BMJ article? Unfortunately, very few. Qualified scientists and epidemiologists have come together to expose the flaws in the BMJ document. But the first line of defense against misinformation must be the scientific journals themselves. In this case, although not the first time, the BMJ has failed in its responsibility as guardian of sound science.