Vaccine Journal Retracts Paper That Links COVID Vaccines to Deaths
COVID-19 Science 05/07/2021 •

The Swiss-based journal Vaccines has retracted a controversial paper linking deaths to COVID-19 vaccines, which prompted the resignation of six members of its editorial board last week.

The paper was titled ‘The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations – We Should Rethink the Policy’, and it attracted massive support from anti-vaxxers who question the safety of vaccines.

Prior to its retraction, the journal issued an “expression of concern” flagging that “serious concerns have been raised about misinterpretation of the data and the conclusions” in the paper, particularly that three deaths reported to be linked to vaccinations is “incorrect and distorted”.

The paragraph that attracted the most controversy argued: “The number of cases experiencing adverse reactions has been reported to be 700 per 100,000 vaccinations. Currently, we see 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations, and the number of fatal side effects is at 4.11/100,000 vaccinations. For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.”

The  paper based its statistics on adverse effects and deaths on data from Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Center, called Lareb. However, anyone can report an adverse effect or death on the database without independent medical verification. After the paper was published, Lareb’s head of science and research, Eugène van Puijenbroek, wrote to the journal and requested that it retract the paper.

The paper listed as its corresponding author the controversial German psychologist Harald Walach. In 2012, he received the Goldene Brett vorm Kopf  (golden blockhead) ‘prize’ for promoting pseudo-science from the German Society for the Scientific Investigation of Pseudosciences.

Walach and co-authors medical physicist Rainer Klement and data analyst Wouter Aukema, responded to Retraction Watch about the retraction of their paper by saying: “We used imperfect data correctly. We are not responsible for the validity and correctness of the data, but for the correctness of the analysis. We contend that our analysis was correct.”

Editorial board resignations include virologist Florian Krammer, from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Oxford University immunologist Katie Ewer, who helped to develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine; New Zealand vaccinologist Helen Petousis-Harris; epidemiologist Diane Harper from the University of Michigan; Australian immunologist Paul Licciardi from Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and virologist Andrew Pekosz from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, according to Science magazine.

 

 

 

Image Credits: International Monetary Fund/Ernesto Benavides.

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