Scientists quit journal board to protest 'grossly irresponsible' study claiming COVID-19 vaccine kills

doi: 10.1126 / science.abk2629

Commentary

The research paper was published in a peer-reviewed article in the June 24 issue of the journal Vaccines after several reputable virologists and vaccinologists resigned as editors of the journal Vaccines, misusing the data and saying, "For every three deaths prevented by COVID-19 vaccination, two injuries must be accepted.

None of the authors of the article, which as of July 1 had attracted nearly 350,000 readers and was tweeted by anti-vaccination activists with hundreds of thousands of followers, are trained in vaccinology, virology or epidemiology.

And the paper's three reviewers (two of whom are anonymous) are described as having made no substantive criticisms of the authors' methodology in these brief reviews.

To draw the conclusions of this paper, the authors used data from a study of 1.2 million Israelis to calculate the number of COVID-19 deaths prevented by the vaccine. Half were vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and half who

Critics have estimated and claimed that 16,000 people would need to be vaccinated to prevent one death from COVID-19.

And to calculate the deaths "caused" by vaccine side effects, they used data on the number of vaccine doses provided in the Netherlands and a huge amount of side effect data from that country's national database.

To summarize, the article explains that in order to write an article critical of vaccines, the authors, who were non-experts in vaccines and other related fields, used only the most convenient data in order to come up with data on adverse reactions.

This article is a rebuttal to the article.