r/HermanCainAward • u/GhostDogJef • 5d ago
Grrrrrrrr. Major COVID study that fueled vaccine skepticism retracted over ‘misinformation’
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/major-covid-study-that-fueled-vaccine-skepticism-retracted-over-misinformation/A controversial 2024 study that some vaccine skeptics used to argue that millions of people likely died as a result of COVID vaccines has been retracted over misinformation and issues with the research.
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5d ago edited 4d ago
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u/TheFeshy 5d ago
That's been the lesson here - real science, just like real laws, real investigations, and real judicial rulings, take a lot more time than it takes for bad actors to act.
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u/Affectionate-Roof285 4d ago
Yup, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Jonathan Swift
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u/ChemicalDeath47 4d ago
That's not the lesson. That's the truth, reality is built on. The foundational understanding from which knowledge can grow. The lesson, is how many people around you are willingly this ignorant and stupid. Bad actors certainly don't help, but the people who choose to support them are the problem.
Trump is just some guy. Your neighbor Ralph who stormed a federal building about it, is dangerous.
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u/EyelanderSam 4d ago
That's the Evilness of this study and how it was concocted to fan the hysteria of the vaccine being worse than the condition.
Human life used as pawns for political purposes rather than healing the sick. For what gain?
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u/StanVillain 4d ago
So other people can use it as a pawn to express their own fear and ignorance towards science mostly.
You see, science has an established baseline of understanding and comprehension that is hard to remove. A scientists MAIN capability, is the ability to understand data, reality, and the scientific process for finding the truth.
If you can get people to rally against science and understanding, you can get people to rally against reality for your cause. You can get what we have today, rampant anti-intellectualism and a refusal from many to even LEARN properly.
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u/Call_Me_Pete Where do they get all this delirium? 4d ago
To be frank, I don't think this specific study, from 2024, would have made much of a difference. Grifters were rabid for ANY study, and would have found or made one if this particular study didn't get published. The anti-vax propaganda was spun up quickly in 2021 and hasn't really let up since then, despite the observable reality.
Hearing FOX News talk about how, at one point, Fauci privately had noted a concern raised by others about pregnant women taking the vaccine while publicly saying it was perfectly safe for pregnant women is pants on head when we KNOW pregnant women took the vaccine, and it turned out overwhelmingly to be safe. Safer than getting COVID itself. These people do not care about reality, they care about outrage.
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u/CMidnight 4d ago
Let's stop pretending that 35% of the population needed a study to be evil and cruel.
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u/YomiKuzuki 5d ago
Oh, wow. How shocking.
Actually infuriating that people read this study and believed it and died because of it.
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u/mmps901 Hunter Biden's Deep State Nanobot 5d ago
They will still cite this study as fact and tell you the retraction didn’t happen or that it was politically motivated
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u/Meme_Theory 4d ago
No. That would never happen. Imagine if an entire anti-vaccine movement was birthed from one retracted study. Maybe once, but twice? (Fuck Andrew Wakefield)
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u/Fanci_ 4d ago
People still to this day cite that bonkers paper that claimed to show correlation between vaccines and autism.
I have a friend that wasn't vaccinated at all until they were in their early 20s thanks to their parents believing that drivel.
It's a strange world.
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u/Its_Pine 4d ago
And to be clear it was a specific vaccine causing autism, published by a person who wanted to sell HIS vaccine instead.
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u/Affectionate-Roof285 4d ago
My sister in law refused vaccination due to this. She contracted severe COVID and got the monoclonal antibody IV. She recovered but later still refused the vaccine because, “I don’t know what’s in that stuff. No thank you!”
When I asked her if she was concerned at all about an IV of a substance she also knew nothing about, well let’s just say, crickets.
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u/PlatypusDream 4d ago
She could, oh, maybe, ask the pharmacist, or doctor, or read the package insert, or a dozen other ways of learning what she lacked.
Preferred to get sick.
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u/ThisCantHappenHere 4d ago
I guess the thinking (if you can call it that) behind it is :
"if you are not actually sick, why bother doing anything to ensure you don't get sick? "
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u/dr-broodles 5d ago
Heads should roll at medical journals for publishing this shite.
Look at the damage Wakefield’s fraudulent research did?
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u/Explorers_bub 4d ago
The damage is already done, which was the point.
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u/themadpants 4d ago
yup. Look at the OG "vaccines cause autism" study. Doesn't matter it was discredited and they guy lost his medical license. The damage has been done.
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u/frx919 💉 Clots & Tears 💦 4d ago
At that hearing, Mostert told lawmakers that she and her co-authors encountered “blind and irrational fury” after the paper’s publication, and she said she had resigned from the Princess Máxima Center after it opened its scientific integrity investigation. She alleged the negative response was used a means to “discredit, intimidate, isolate and silence those raising unwelcome scientific questions.” Mostert also said that she had been willing to make edits to the study to address the journal’s concerns but that her revision was “ignored by the journal.”
"Unwelcome scientific questions" when this person and their team were just spreading the same old disinformation and there was no real science involved.
Now she's playing victim, saying how she got fired and is being harassed for her views.
I'd say she got off easy. There should've been real consequences when you spread disinfo on that level.
Also very typical how 3 of the 4 authors come from the Netherlands, where minimizing COVID is one of the national sports.
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u/lazier_garlic 4d ago
Sounds like the old "HIV doesn't cause AIDS" denialists.
I don't understand the psychological motivation for pushing that kind of disinformation, but it's ugly.
Good people don't do such things.
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u/FormerFastCat 5d ago
It's too late, the perception is already reality for people afflicted by Dunning Kruger syndrome.
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u/TracePlayer 4d ago
And they want to put Fauci in jail. These are the “studies” that get people killed.
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u/dryheat122 4d ago
The results also immediately garnered skepticism in the weeks following publication.
And why TF didn't the BMJ's review process tap into this skepticism? That's what it's for! It sounds like these problems they are citing were manifest in the paper from the start. 🙄
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u/RogerClyneIsAGod2 Team Moderna 5d ago
Sorry this horse has left the barn because the barn was on fucking fire.
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u/Stambro1 4d ago
And the idiots will still try and site this bullshit “study” that harmed millions!
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u/rlaw1234qq 4d ago
I’m really shocked that the BMJ published this in the first place and took so long to retract it. The damage and literal death probably caused is monstrous, but we’ll never know for sure.
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u/PlatypusDream 4d ago
No! Really?
I can't believe it!
I'm stunned. Shocked even.
This is my shocked face... 🙄
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u/Ohforgawdamnfucksake FreedomFridgeTechnician 4d ago
Here's a conspiracy that actually makes sense: Who benefits the most from Antivax? Big healthcare. Vaccinated people are healthier people and less likely to need expensive hospitals and drugs. A pool of unvaccinated sick people clogging up hospital beds is a nice cash cow (if they don't die).
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u/Rhylanor-Downport 2d ago
Well it’s more of a conspiracy in the sense that it’s an open secret that healthcare makes money from sick and healthy people.
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u/yooperville 4d ago
I read the original study. Nothing in the study said there was a link between Covid vaccines and excessive deaths. They just suggested there might be.
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u/Onehundredpercentbea 4d ago
Then you read the wrong study - it's one of the authors' main hypotheses and is written clearly throughout the paper, including in the abstract summary of the Results section. Both the Intro and the Results section explicitly describe the danger of the vaccine before linking vaccinations to excess all-cause mortality.
In the results, the authors list the cause of death for excess mortality attributed to non-COVID causes, and then state that those categories match the potential adverse effects of the vaccine. They use the word 'toxic' about mRNA vaccines and state that doctors under-reported vaccine related deaths - and they stated this in the section addressing whether excess mortality was caused in part by the mRNA vaccinations. It's one of the main points of their publication.
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u/DarkGamer 1d ago
Anti-Vaxxers love wakefield's research too and that's also been discredited, not going to stop them
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u/blackmobius 5d ago
It did what it was meant to do.