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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine

Just in time for Halloween, Mark Skidmore’s zombie antivax pseudoscience rises again

Tech bro turned antivax influencer Steve Kirsch is claiming that Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore has been “exonerated” after having had a paper retracted claiming 278K deaths from COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 alone. In reality, Skidmore’s paper is zombie pseudoscience that’s back from the grave.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the last two decades dealing with antivax propaganda, it’s that bad papers written by antivax ideologues designed to promote a narrative that vaccines are dangerous and/or ineffective (but mostly dangerous) never die. Just take a look at the prototypical example of the modern antivaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 case series published in The Lancet that purported to show an association between the MMR vaccine and “autistic enterocolitis,” a finding that was also promoted from the beginning as a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It took 12 years to get the paper retracted (as it should have been very quickly), with an investigation by journalist Brian Deer resulting in findings demonstrating scientific fraud. Unfortunately during that 12 years, Wakefield’s paper caused all manner of havoc stoking vaccine hesitancy in the UK and beyond. Even after retraction, it still has way more influence than any paper that bad and deserving of retraction should. I could go on and on discussing antivax papers that somehow either never died, survived retraction, or reappeared in new journals after retraction—Anthony Mawsonanyone?—but this time around I want to discuss a retracted paper that has reappeared, leading tech bro turned ridiculously over-the-top antivax influencer Steve Kirsch to write a post over the weekend on his Substack entitled MSU Professor Mark Skidmore was exonerated by MSU; his landmark paper showing over 250,000 killed by the COVID vaccine is now back in the peer-reviewed literature.

As you will see, this title is a mixture of one likely accurate piece of information that I will need to investigate further next week (about the IRB), a lie (that Skidmore’s study showed that as many as 278,000  people had been killed by COVID-19 vaccines), and a half-truth (that his awful “study” is back in the peer-reviewed literature).

First, let’s see what our antivax tech bro has to say, Predictably, he is crowing, because of course he is:

Mark Skidmore wrote a paper that showed that 217,000 Americans were killed in 2021 by the COVID vaccine.

The journal retracted the article and Mark’s university commenced a 7-month investigation into unethical behavior by Professor Skidmore.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Professor Skidmore has been exonerated on all charges and his paper, with some helpful additions suggested by Dr. Susan Oliver (and her dog, Cindy), has now been published in another peer-reviewed journal.

Oh, dear. He’s dragging Dr. Oliver—and her dog Cindy!—into this and not me? It’s true that her video deconstructing Prof. Skidmore’s nonsense is an epic takedown of a really “stupid” paper (her words):

This video applies to both the old version of the manuscript and the new, because there hasn’t been much change in the new.

But, hey, Prof. Skidmore, Liberty Counsel, and Steve Kirsch, where’s the love for your humble SBM blogger too? After all, I wrote detailed deconstruction over at my not-so-secret other blog of why his paper was utter crap, why I thought that the IRB should have exercised better oversight, and why his “estimate” of over a quarter million people killed by COVID-19 vaccines was so risibly detached from data and reality. There’s a reason why I originally referred to his “study” as “antivax propaganda disguised as a survey.” (I’ll stop whining now, at least about this other than to assure Dr. Oliver that, no, even as bad as Prof. Skidmore’s paper is, contrary to what you say, it’s still not the worst antivax paper ever. I know. I’ve been at this a long time. Unfortunately.)

Since it’s been a long time since I wrote about the original iteration of this “study,” I will have to take some time to repeat major criticisms here as I discuss the situation., mainly because I think it’s necessary and better than just referring readers to my previous post, although that’s still there if you want to read it.

There’s also something very telling in how this “exoneration” supposedly came about:

See this press release that Mark sent me.

The press release was drafted by the Liberty Counsel who was instrumental in defending Mark in the investigation by Michigan State University. If you want to support their work, please donate here.

Bottom line: After a 7-month ethics investigation, Michigan State University found that Mark did nothing wrong!

Note: What this really means is that they tried for 7 months to find something they could nail him on, and they failed.

Not exactly, as I will explain. Before I get to the issue of the MSU IRB, let me point out that a powerful right-wing advocacy group that is not just Christian dominionist but antivaccine and rabidly anti-LGBTQ+  promoted this study and defended Prof. Skidmore during the IRB investigation. Interesting. Let’s see what the Liberty Counsel press release dated October 17 claims:

Liberty Counsel recently helped exonerate a Michigan State University professor after he received allegations that he had used “unethical practices” during a published COVID-19 shot study. The study highlighted a correlation between the COVID shot and nearly 300,000 nationwide fatalities. The peer-reviewed journal BMC Infectious Diseases originally published the study in January 2023, but later retracted it amid the allegations. Despite the study’s retraction, it remains in the top one percent of shared research around the world.

Remember what I said about how bad antivax papers have an outsized influence on social media? That link shows that Skidmore’s paper still has an Altmetric score of 4,962, which is #2 most shared from all BMC Infectious Diseases papers, with Altmetrics noting:

Altmetric has tracked 24,654,416 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it’s in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.

Depressing, but it shows how popular antivax papers are, and, of course, Steve Kirsch relentlessly flogged this incompetent paper when it was first published. Now let’s look at the BMC Infectious Diseases retraction notice:

The editors have retracted this article as concerns were raised regarding the validity of the conclusions drawn after publication. Post-publication peer review concluded that the methodology was inappropriate as it does not prove causal inference of mortality, and limitations of the study were not adequately described. Furthermore, there was no attempt to validate reported fatalities, and there are critical issues in the representativeness of the study population and the accuracy of data collection. Lastly, contrary to the statement in the article, the documentation provided by the author confirms that the study was exempt from ethics approval and therefore was not approved by the IRB of the Michigan State University Human Research Protection Program.

This, of course, is just a very brief version of what I wrote about the paper and of the many criticisms that others made about it starting as soon as it was published. I will, however, have to go into the issue of the Michigan State University institutional review board (IRB), as it demonstrates how clueless many IRBs are about antivax “science.”

To show you what I mean, let’s take a look at the gloating of the Liberty Counsel:

After a seven-month ethics investigation, Michigan State University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) cleared Dr. Skidmore of any wrongdoing stating they did not find any “noncompliance” to their protocols within the study. Dr. Skidmore’s COVID shot study did not involve clinical work, but rather involved an online survey that posed little risk to human respondents. Due to his study being a survey only, the IRB at the onset of the research determined Dr. Skidmore’s study to be “exempt” from those clinical protocols and was cleared to proceed.

Later, I will then explain why this is a questionable finding that suggests a serious problem with university IRBs—a problem that is, unfortunately, more serious than even I had thought at the time. Finally:

While the original study remains retracted, the peer-reviewed journal Science, Public Health Policy & the Law recently published an updated version of the study titled, “COVID-19 Illness and Vaccination Experiences in Social Circles Affect COVID-19 Vaccination Decisions.” According to the study’s abstract, the primary goal was to identify what factors affect Americans in their decisions to get the COVID shot.

Does the journal Science, Public Health Policy & the Law sound familiar? It should. One thing lost in all the gloating by Steve Kirsch and the Liberty Counsel is that this particular journal is published by IPAK, as you can rapidly see by just glancing at the top of the first page of Prof. Skidmore’s revised paper. Then, take a look at the editorial board of this “journal”! It’s chock full of a veritable rogues’ gallery of antivaxxers, many of whom I’ve discussed before multiple times, including Russell BlaylockGayle DeLongBrian Hooker, Mary HollandRick Jaffe (Stanislaw Burzynski‘s former attorney whom he stiffed for $250,000 in legal bills!), Anthony Mawson, Christopher Shaw, and Paul Thomas. (It’s a list that needs updating, because, sadly, Ms. DeLong passed away nearly two years ago.) Let’s just say that such a panoply of pseudoexperts, quacks, and pseudoscientists on the “journal’s” editorial board does not give me much confidence in its peer review. Basically, Prof. Skidmore, if he had any shame, would be super embarrassed by this, as his manuscript went from being retracted by a real journal to being published in a fake journal founded by an antivax pseudoscience that is used primarily to promote antivax pseudoscience.

What is IPAK, you ask? IPAK stands for the Institute of Pure and Applied Knowledge. If that name alone, even devoid of any knowledge of who is behind the “institute,” isn’t enough to send up huge red flags, then consider this. IPAK was founded by James Lyons-Weiler, an antivaxxer about whom I’ve written on many occasions dating back to before the pandemic, both here and on my not-so-super-secret other blog. As you will see, while it is true that the survey appears to have been to “identify what factors affect Americans in their decisions to get the COVID shot,” Prof. Skidmore went way beyond that by taking the results of the survey and extrapolating them to estimate that COVID shots had killed over a quarter million people.

Let’s start with a discussion of what’s wrong with this paper, how Skidmore revised it, and why the new paper is no better than the old, all in the context of how, in my opinion, the IPAK “journal” where the revised manuscript found a new home is not a real scientific journal at all, but an antivax propaganda rag that isn’t even indexed by PubMed.

The first version was a “bait and switch” study using horrible methodology

In my original analysis of the first version of this survey published in BMC Infectious Diseases, I referred to the whole “study” as a “bait-and-switch” designed to promote an antivax narrative. Here’s why. On the surface, the primary aim of the original version of Prof. Skidmore’s survey seemed not at all unreasonable, as related in the original abstract:

The primary aim of this work is to identify the factors associated by American citizens with the decision to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Nor was Prof. Skidmore’s methodology out of the ordinary—on the surface:

An online survey of COVID-19 health experiences was conducted. Information was collected regarding reasons for and against COVID-19 inoculations, experiences with COVID-19 illness and COVID-19 inoculations by survey respondents and their social circles. Logit regression analyses were carried out to identify factors influencing the likelihood of being vaccinated.

However, the true purpose of Prof. Skidmore’s survey rapidly became apparent, from what read to me like a tacked-on analysis:

In addition, the proportion of fatal events from COVID-19 vaccinations was estimated and compared with the data in the VAERS database.

As Scooby-Doo would, say, “Ruh-roh!” I sensed…an antivax assumption behind the survey, the same antivax assumption behind deceptive dumpster-diving into VAERS, namely that every report of a death or adverse event that occurs after vaccination must have been caused by vaccination.

And that appeared to be exactly the assumption that Prof. Skidmore had. First, let’s look at an entirely unsurprising finding of the original survey:

A total of 2840 participants completed the survey between December 18 and 23, 2021. 51% (1383 of 2840) of the participants were female and the mean age was 47 (95% CI 46.36–47.64) years. Those who knew someone who experienced a health problem from COVID-19 were more likely to be vaccinated (OR: 1.309, 95% CI 1.094–1.566), while those who knew someone who experienced a health problem following vaccination were less likely to be vaccinated (OR: 0.567, 95% CI 0.461–0.698). 34% (959 of 2840) reported that they knew at least one person who had experienced a significant health problem due to the COVID-19 illness. Similarly, 22% (612 of 2840) of respondents indicated that they knew at least one person who had experienced a severe health problem following COVID-19 vaccination.

As I noted at the time, it made intuitive sense that people who know someone who experienced a significant health issue after a bout with COVID-19 would be more likely to be vaccinated, while those who know someone who experienced a severe health issue after COVID-19 vaccination—whether that health problem was related to the vaccine or not, I hasten to add—would be less likely to be vaccinated. I conceded at the time that there might have been some utility in demonstrating this point about vaccine hesitancy yet again and perhaps attempting to quantify the effect. As I also said at the time, I had no problem with that sort of survey. What I did have a problem with is when such a survey was used as a jumping-off point to support conspiracy theories involving vaccine “depopulation” and “died suddenly” narratives. Here’s what I meant, again, quoting from the original version of the paper:

With these survey data, the total number of fatalities due to COVID-19 inoculation may be as high as 278,000 (95% CI 217,330–332,608) when fatalities that may have occurred regardless of inoculation are removed.

“Fatalities that may have occurred regardless of inoculation are removed”? How, pray tell, did Prof. Skidmore figure this out? Then there was the original conclusion:

Knowing someone who reported serious health issues either from COVID-19 or from COVID-19 vaccination are important factors for the decision to get vaccinated. The large difference in the possible number of fatalities due to COVID-19 vaccination that emerges from this survey and the available governmental data should be further investigated.

See what I meant at the time by a “bait-and-switch”? Prof. Skidmore started with what seemed to be a fairly reasonable conclusion (health issues among a person’s social circle after COVID-19 or COVID-19 vaccination influence will influence that person’s decision to get vaccinated) but then used unjustified extrapolation to buttress an antivax conclusion, namely that vaccines killed nearly 300K people. Prof. Skidmore then JAQed off about the supposed discrepancy between this estimate and government statements about the safety of the vaccines, using his JAQing off to call for an “investigation.” True, at the very end Prof. Skidmore conceded that there are “limitations with using a survey to collect COVID-19 health information, particularly for a politicized health issue” and respondents “often interpret events with bias due to perceptions based on history, beliefs, culture and family background.” (Well, duh.) Unfortunately, these limitations were only mentioned in a paragraph near the very end of the paper and did not dispel the overall narrative that this survey was evidence that COVID-19 vaccines had killed—as of the end of 2021, when the survey period ended—close to 300,000 people.

Regular readers know that the most significant limitations of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database are that anyone can report anything and that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. That’s why antivaxxers have long loved to dumpster dive into the VAERS database and misrepresent every report as being slam dunk evidence that a given adverse event (AE) reported was definitely due to the vaccine that it happened after. As antivaxxers do with VAERS, Prof. Skidmore appeared to accept nearly every respondent’s report of a death from the vaccine as having been caused by the vaccine.

The first issue, though, was that a survey like this is just not a valid method to calculate a valid and accurate estimate of the number of deaths due to…well, almost any cause, regardless of the source of the survey subjects, in this case Dynata, a company that was billed as the “world’s largest first-party data platform” and having provided a sample that was “representative for the US American population.” Let’s assume for the moment that this claim is justified and the sample used was representative of the US population. Even in that case, Prof. Skidmore’s methodology that extrapolated from his survey results to claim such a high death toll from COVID-19 vaccines was completely bogus, given that deciding whether any given death is plausibly due to a vaccine is far from the straightforward determination that Prof. Skidmore apparently thinks it is. When someone in a person’s circle of relatives, friends, and acquaintances dies, generally that person will just take the family members’ word for what the cause of death was, regardless of whether the family member is correct or not about that cause of death. Prof. Skidmore even conceded as much reporting one of his original results, sort of:

Estimated nationwide COVID-19 vaccine fatalities based on the Democrat, Republican and Independent subsets are 109,564, 463,444 and 247,867, respectively. With the vaccinated and unvaccinated subgroups, estimated COVID-19 vaccine fatalities are 110,942 and 659,995.

There was actually a germ of an interesting observation here, namely that political and ideological orientation has a huge effect on whether a person attributes the death of a loved one, friend, or family member to COVID-19 vaccines.This observation, however, said absolutely nothing about whether that death of a loved one, friend, or family member was actually caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Indeed, the huge discrepancy in the numbers based on ideological groups should tell you in and of itself that these numbers were perceptions, not reality. In the hands of a researcher not hellbent on spinning these results into antivaccine disinformation, these results could have served as the preliminary data from which to develop interesting hypotheses to test in further studies. Prof. Skidmore is an economist, however, not a social scientist, and instead he used these numbers to argue that we should “investigate” the apparent discrepancy between these numbers and the government’s figures. In other words, he used them to bolster the antivax “died suddenly” conspiracy theory that claims the vaccines are killing huge numbers of people but “they” are “covering up” the evidence:

The ratio of COVID-19 vaccine deaths to COVID-19 illness deaths of the people respondents knew best who had health problems is 57/165 =0.345, whereas the ratio of vaccine-associated fatalities to COVID-19 fatalities from government sources is 8023/839,993 = 0.0096. The null hypothesis (H0) that the true ratio, X, is equal to the CDC ratio which is also equal to the survey ratio: X = CDC Ratio = Survey Ratio.

This hypothesis is tested using state-by-state VAERS data on reported COVID-19 vaccine-associated deaths and COVID-19 illness fatalities. The alternative hypothesis (Ha) is: X = CDC Ratio < Survey Ratio. The mean (u) and standard deviation (σ) of the ratio of vaccine fatalities to COVID-19 fatalities from the state-by-state data are u = 0.0136 and σ = 0.0111. The probability that the Survey Ratio > CDC Ratio = X is P(CDC Ratio > 0.345). With P(CDC Ratio > 0.345) = 0 and a Z-score = 28.86; the null hypothesis is rejected.

So science-y! So statistics-y! So wrong!

So basically, Prof. Skidmore, for reasons known only to him, tested a fantasy hypothesis that his estimate of how many deaths resulting from COVID-19 vaccines based on a survey that reflected the perceptions of the respondents and notactual medical reality, should match government statistics and declared the hypothesis falsified when the two numbers turned out to be very different from each other. Then he did the same thing with VAERS. Truly, this was fractal pseudoscience whose abuse of frequentist statistics was truly impressive.

I also noted at the time that Prof. Skidmore’s ideological bias was far from secret, citing his website Lighthouse Economics, where he maintains a personal blog. Just a brief perusal of his blog demonstrates that he’s a hard core antivaccine conspiracy theorist. If you don’t believe me, just peruse some of these entries for yourself, such as:

You get the idea. Prof. Skidmore conducted his survey because he’s antivax.

More interestingly, the Funding section revealed to me that this entire survey had been funded by one person, Catherine Austin Fitts. At the time, I had never heard of Ms. Fitts; so Google was my friend. It didn’t take long to find out that she’s worked with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. before, with a Washington Post article noting:

The viral clip from “Planet Lockdown” depicts an interview with Catherine Austin Fitts, who served as assistant secretary of housing and urban development under President George H.W. Bush and has since worked in finance. Fitts, who has no background in medicine or public health, has worked with anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to promote unfounded claims about the pandemic and to oppose lockdown measures put in place to slow the spread of the virus.

So the original survey was carried by an antivaxxer using funding from an antivax conspiracy loon who’s worked with one of the longtime leaders of the antivaccine movement, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Moreover, the real purpose of Prof. Skidmore’s “research had been hidden in plain sight for nearly a year before the publication of the first version of his survey, as I discovered when I did some digging last January. Buried in a list of papers in a Steve Kirsch Substack entitled License to kill (and how to redpill patients) there’s a link to a paper published as a PDF on Prof. Skidmore’s site as a “working paper” entitled How Many People Died from the Covid-19 Inoculations? An Estimate Based on a Survey of the United States Population*. Interestingly, the primary and secondary aims listed in the “working paper” were identical to the aims in the retracted version originally published in BMC Infectious Diseases, but flipped. The primary aim in the old “working paper” dated February 28, 2022 was to examine “the potential fatalities and injuries from the COVID-19 inoculation using an online ‘Covid-19 Health Experiences Survey’ administered to a representative sample of the United States (US) population,” while almost as an afterthought Prof. Skidmore wrote that “I also analyze the factors that influence the likelihoods of being inoculated, experiencing an adverse event, and knowing someone who was injured by the COVID-19 inoculation.” (Emphasis mine.)

Looking at the original paper in light of this nearly year-old precursor (which quoted antivax luminaries like Sen. Ron Johnson and Informed Choice Australia—even the execrable Stephanie Seneff “review” article on vaccine harm), I remain even more convinced that the original paper was a total bait-and-switch and still think that Prof. Skidmore did the survey to come up with an inflated estimate for the number of COVID-19 vaccine “deaths” but also did an analysis of factors leading to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, which would be much more palatable to reviewers and thus more likely to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. He then shoehorned in the inflated, implausible, and unproven death estimates, whose successful publication in a reputable peer-reviewed journal was the realpurpose of this survey. The “working paper” version of the manuscript is a “greatest hits” collection of antivaccine tropes, distortions, and misinterpretations of scientific studies; the published version is cleaned up just enough to make it past peer review by people clearly not familiar with antivaccine disinformation but still keep the claim that COVID-19 vaccines caused 278,000 deaths in the final version, so that antivaxxers can point to it instead of the correlations between various responses and likelihood to accept the COVID-19 vaccine.

Now let’s take a look at the “revised” paper published by IPAK.

Second verse, same as the first (mostly)

The first thing I did examining the “revised” paper was to do a quicky text comparison of the abstracts of the two using BBEdit. It turns out that the abstracts are virtually identical, except for the format. Take out the headings and line breaks after each section from the retracted paper, and the text of the “revised” paper is identical to that of the original. Not a good sign. It is equally a bad sign that the entire introduction of the second version is virtually identical to that of the original version, other than referring to the CDC as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and differences in references cited in the more recent version. The second paragraphs of both introductions are identical, word-for word.

I did find some minor differences in the Methods section. For example, in the new manuscript Prof. Skidmore deleted a passage going on about how the CDC had supposedly changed the definition of COVID-19 deaths and was overcounting them, in essence a restatement of what I called the “only 6% gambit” from that claimed that “only” 6% of deaths attributed to COVID-19 were actually COVID deaths. It was a conspiracy theory that claimed that the CDC and others were misattributing deaths from other conditions to COVID-19. In addition, part of the passage deleted stated:

Additional analysis is conducted wherein CDC data on deaths per 100,000 people for pre-pandemic 2019 are used to calculate the expected number of fatalities by age group, which is subtracted from reported COVID-19 vaccine fatalities in the survey to obtain COVID-19 vaccine-related fatalities net of deaths that might have occurred regardless of vaccination status.

Apparently this analysis is not in the new version. More suspiciously, an entire section in the first version about how “severe” AEs were defined appears not to have made it to the new version. Basically, in the original version, a non-physician economist decided which AEs constituted potentially “severe” life-threatening AEs. In the new version, the criteria for severe AEs are much less clear, and Prof. Skidmore writes merely, “‘Severe’ and ‘less severe’ adverse events are calculated separately.”

Looking at the results in both papers shows…not much change. Other than format, Table I appears to be identical in both papers, as do Tables 2, 3, and 4. There is, however, a chart in the new version that was not included in the old, Figure 1:

Skidmore's new figure
How did Prof. Skidmore get this figure, you might ask? Read on, friends!

To find out how Prof. Skidmore got this figure, you have to read the file named Supplementary Material 4, which contains a Microsoft Word file describing the methodology. It turns out that it’s basically the same nonsense that Prof. Skidmore did, just with more verbiage. Basically, he tries to estimate how many people would have “died anyway” not necessarily because of the vaccines by, well, let me just let him explain, so that you can facepalm at his “sensitivity analysis”:

It is possible that reported deaths following vaccination were not caused by vaccination but rather were coincident with vaccination.  To address this issue, one could subtract deaths that might have occurred regardless of vaccination status.  The phrasing of the survey question with regard to potential vaccine related health problems made it clear that health issues that emerged following vaccination should be reported. This suggests that it may be inappropriate to subtract deaths resulting from ongoing chronic conditions or other ongoing illnesses that would likely be known by respondent prior to vaccination. In other words, deaths that arise relatively quickly that might have occurred in tandem with vaccination but would have occurred regardless of vaccination status should be subtracted.  According to Slovis, et al. (1), the five most common causes of sudden death are fatal arrhythmias, acute myocardial infarction, intracranial hemorrhage/massive stroke (cerebrovascular accident), massive pulmonary embolism and acute aortic catastrophe.

Available from the author upon request are the calculations for the reported Covid vaccine deaths from the survey along with the 2019 standardized mortality rates per 100,000 people for the top ten causes of death for each age group, which are obtained from the National Center for Health Statistics (2).

So basically, Prof. Skidmore assumes—and remember what they say happens when you “assume” anything—that any increase in “sudden” deaths over the “baseline” in 2019, as opposed to deaths from chronic diseases and conditions, that occurred after the vaccines rolled out,. were most likely due to the vaccines, assuming that people with chronic diseases who died relatively quickly would probably have “died anyway.” Maybe an epidemiologist will request the calculations. I know that Prof. Skidmore knows who I am and would be highly unlikely to provide me his calculations.

In the revised paper itself:

This evaluation is conducted under the assumption that the reported vaccine-related fatalities and injuries are caused by the COVID-19 vaccine but is now relaxed by reducing the number of reported fatalities by the deaths due to other causes that would be expected to have occurred anyway. Subtracting expected fatalities from “quick onset” conditions (diseases of the heart and cerebrovascular diseases) generates estimated nationwide COVID-19 vaccine fatalities of 205,737. If all expected fatalities except those from external causes are subtracted, estimated nationwide COVID-19 vaccine fatalities are 126,407. More detail on these calculations is provided in Supplementary Material 4.

And in Supplemental Material 4:

As shown in Figure 1 in the body of the article, expected fatalities exceed reported fatalities for the 65-74 and 74-85 age groups, but the other categories generate positive vaccine deaths after subtracting expected fatalities.  Setting COVID-19 vaccine fatalities to zero for the 65-74 and over 74 age groups, and tallying net fatalities for the other age groups generates 39 vaccine-related fatalities. Applying the same method described in the article to calculate estimated nationwide vaccine-induced fatalities generates 205,737 fatalities.  Subtracting expected fatalities from all causes generates negative net fatalities for the 55-64 age group as well.  In this case, the sum of fatalities net of all expected fatalities is 25, which generates projected fatalities nationwide of about 126,407 fatalities.

Wait, what? I thought that the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval was 229,319!

In any case, surely you can see the problem with extrapolating in this fashion from 39 fatalities—or 25 fatalities or however many people who reported knowing someone who died after COVID-19 vaccination—even if they were truly related to COVID-19 vaccines, to produce an estimate in the hundreds of thousands of deaths. It’s the same essential problem with the first manuscript, and the second is no better. It’s the same analysis, with the same four tables, just with an additional tacked-on graph based on a meaningless extrapolation from small numbers. To put it more broadly, extrapolating the results of a survey with 2,840 respondents to a population of roughly 330 million is problematic enough, even if you leave aside the fact that what is being reported is perception, not reality.

Truly, the new and “revised” version of this “study” is, for all intents and purposes, nearly identical to the retracted study. Both are bad science. The only difference is that now the “study” is published in an appropriate journal, a fake journal with an editorial board full of antivaxxers sympathetic to bad “science” like this, letting Prof. Skidmore come to use invalid assumptions, unwarranted extrapolation, and general bad science to come to exactly the same conclusion as he did in his retracted paper, “The large difference in the possible number of fatalities due to COVID-19 vaccination that emerges from this survey and the available governmental data should be further investigated.”

But what about the IRB?

Now that we’ve established that Prof. Skidmore’s revised paper is just the same old rancid wine in a new skin, it’s important to address the second part of all of the crowing coming from Steve Kirsch, the Liberty Counsel, and, yes, James Lyons-Weiler himself over how Prof. Skidmore has been “exonerated” (and therefore you should believe his crappy paper just because the IRB didn’t find that he had done anything wrong and an antivaxxer was willing to publish his dreck in his fake journal). The Liberty Counsel, being a right-wing crank group run by lawyer and former pastor Mat Staver, couldn’t resist framing its victory thusly:

Since 2021, there have been several instances of publications retracting research that has identified possible causal links between COVID-19 shots and adverse reactions. In July 2023, Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist, epidemiologist, and one of the most published cardiologists in America with more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications to his credit, was quickly censored within 24 hours after he published an article showing clear evidence that the COVID-19 shots were responsible for many deaths. Out of 325 autopsies from various global locations, the study revealed the COVID shots directly caused or significantly contributed to up to 74 percent of those deaths. The Lancet, which initially published the article, took less than 24 hours to remove it citing the study fell short of the journal’s “screening criteria” and that the study’s methods did not merit its conclusions.

Not mentioned is that Dr. McCullough is now a quack selling dubious supplements to treat COVID-19 and to “detoxify” you from the supposedly deadly spike protein made after vaccination with mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines and that both of those paper were pure dreck. I laughed out loud at this part, though:

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “The allegations against Dr. Mark Skidmore were baseless. Researchers with integrity like Dr. Skidmore are using rigorous scientific protocols to validate the dangers of the COVID-19 shots. Censoring scientific debate is reprehensible and our researchers need to be free to conduct proper science without fear of late

Again, to me such retractions are quality control, not “censorship,” although I remain continually frustrated how poor and slow that quality control is. Also, “rigorous scientific protocols”? You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means, but, then, neither Mr. Staver nor Prof. Skidmore are physicians or scientists.

As for the MSU IRB, what happened? Liberty Counsel, before crowing about Prof. Skidmore’s “exoneration,” writes:

The study’s author, Dr. Mark Skidmore, is an economics, natural disasters, and pandemics researcher with more than 90 published papers. Liberty Counsel assisted him in reviewing the anonymous complaints and responding to the investigation to appropriately address all the concerns. In essence, the complaints alleged Dr. Skidmore did not follow the rigorous oversight procedures required for clinical studies. A “guilty” finding from the university on this type of complaint could have serious consequences for a researcher’s credibility and career, since clinical studies involving human subjects have strict oversight and protocols to ensure no harm comes to study participants.

That’s laying it on a bit thick. Prof. Skidmore is described on his MSU webpage as tenured Professor and Morris Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy, while currently serving as a resident fellow with the MSU Extension Center for Local Government Finance and Policy, as well as holding appointments in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics and Economics. His areas of expertise include public finance policy and the relationship between policy and economic development, with recent research areas including work on property taxation, regional development, and the economics of natural disasters. None of this betrays any evidence of work on pandemics before this. I perused his list of publications, and didn’t find anything related to pandemics other than this most recent paper.

First of all, I always rather half-feared that the MSU IRB would fail to find any wrongdoing or failure. As I asked while discussing the now-retracted first version of this manuscript: How did this study manage to get approval from MSU’s IRB, anyway? My guess at the time was that the survey looked like a straightforward assessment of factors that affected people’s decision to be vaccinated against COVID-19, without any obvious indication how the authors would use the results to deceptively claim that close to 300,000 people had been killed by COVID-19 vaccines and then bolster a conspiracy that the government was somehow hiding this carnage. Again, the whole study struck me (and continues to strike me) as a bait-and-switch designed to get antivaccine disinformation published in a peer reviewed journal. Also, Prof. Skidmore purchased access to the sample surveyed from a company, which anonymized the data, meaning that Prof. Skidmore did not have access to personally identifiable information of the subjects.

IRBs are tasked with ensuring the safety of human subjects in research, as well as with protecting their rights. The definition of “human research” is not always clear, however, when it comes to social sciences and surveys. It is true that many surveys fall into a human subjects research category that is exempt from detailed IRB oversight—but not exempt from all IRB oversight. For example, my guess is that Prof. Skidmore’s research most likely qualified for this exemption, which requires a limited IRB review:

Exempt 2(iii). LIMITED IRB REVIEW REQUIRED. Research involving the use of educational tests, survey procedures, interview procedures or observation of public behavior and information obtained is recorded by the investigator in such a manner that the identity of the human subjects can readily be ascertained and disclosure of the responses outside the research could reasonably place the subjects at risk.

This exemption requires a limited IRB review to make the determination that “[w]hen appropriate, there are adequate provisions to protect the privacy of subjects and to maintain the confidentiality of data.” That’s it.

If the IRB didn’t know about the antecedent “white paper” showing the true purpose of Prof. Skidmore’s survey as an instrument designed to estimate how many people had died from COVID-19 vaccinations, I’m sure that the survey probably looked benign enough to the IRB, just a tool to estimate vaccine hesitancy and relate it to different socioeconomic and societal characteristics. The only reason it needed limited review was because the identity of the human subjects might have been able to be ascertained. Also, the survey itself (in Supplemental Materials 1) describes the purpose of the research only as, “You are being asked to participate in this web-based survey in order to increase our understanding of the health experiences people have had during the COVID-19 crisis period.” Again, that sounds pretty benign, with no indication of what Prof. Skidmore was really going to do with the results.

If the failure of the MSU IRB to detect that this survey was really human subjects research in the form of a pseudo-epidemiological study was quite understandable two years ago, when the initial study was being reviewed, why is it that the IRB did not find any violations on the part of Prof. Skidmore once he had published his paper misusing the results to extrapolate in a completely invalid fashion from his survey a huge number deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines? After all, if the scope of a survey-study expands to become arguably human subjects research, then a good case can be made that the IRB should treat it as more of an epidemiological or clinical study.

So why did the IRB fail to act? One possible reason is that the subjects were drawn from a company, meaning that, although the company knew who the survey subjects were, Prof. Skidmore did not because the data were anonymized. (That’s one reason to use a company like Dynata.) Another possible reason is a common view that it’s not the job of the IRB to police bad science except when the poor quality of the science endangers the human subjects in the study. As a result, IRBs are less likely to intervene against bad science when the study is “just a survey” than when it is an actual clinical trial or clinical study with patients. Finally, one can’t discount the very real possibility that the university was afraid of litigation by the Liberty Counsel, which has very deep pockets, aggressive lawyers, and a propensity to sue, sue, sue, and found it easier just to let Prof. Skidmore off rather than face the wrath of the Liberty Counsel. Which of these, either alone or in combination, was the reason for the shameful dereliction of duty by the MSU IRB? I have no way of knowing. I just know that the MSU IRB failed miserably in this instance, even if it did so by following the letter of the law governing human research but ignoring its spirit.

I began this post by stating that the antivax narrative about the “exoneration” of Mark Skidmore is based on  one possibly accurate piece of information, a lie, and a half-truth (that his awful “study” is back in the peer-reviewed literature). The likely accurate piece of information is that the MSU IRB did “exonerate” Prof. Skidmore of violating US regulations with respect to human subjects research. (Note that it did not “exonerate” his study on a scientific basis.) The lie is that Prof. Skidmore’s study is evidence that COVID-19 vaccines might have killed well over a quarter million people by the end of 2021, which was only a little more than a year after the vaccines had rolled out. The half-truth is that the study is back in the peer-reviewed literature. I’m sure that Science, Public Health Policy & the Law probably does do a form of “peer review,” but, if its editorial board full of antivaxxers is any indication, that peer review is perfunctory, low quality, and biased towards papers claiming to find nonexistent dangers du to vaccines. Also, the journal is not indexed by PubMed, for obvious reasons. In my opinion, it’s a fake scientific journal run by cranks.

Whether the MSU IRB failed or not, I do take some consolation in the utter humiliation of an antivax crank like Prof. Skidmore, except that he appears to be too shameless to care about how much his credibility outside of right wing antivax circles has likely been devastated. His paper was retracted by a real journal with a good reputation, and, MSU IRB “exoneration” notwithstanding, he was reduced to publishing it in a not very heavily revised form in a highly dubious journal that was founded by an antivaxxer and whose editorial board consists of the dregs of antivax “academics.” It is a fate that he richly deserves, although, again, I fear that he is far too shameless to appreciate just how far he has fallen. On the other hand, his cachet in the antivaccine movement has been bolstered because now not only does he have a narrative of having been “censored” when his original manuscript was retracted but he now has added a narrative of “exoneration,” even if it requires publishing in an antivax journal that, I daresay, before the pandemic he never would have considered, recognizing it for what it is.

Unfortunately, the power of crank journals like IPAK’s resurrected the rotting corpse of Prof. Skidmore’s antivax “study,” and Skidmore was all too willing to let the dark necromancy do its dirty work. On Halloween, Prof. Skidmore’s zombie antivax pseudoscience is back from the grave and ready to party with COVID-19. Worse, it’s already bitten Steve Kirsch, who, infected by the zombie virus of bad science, is no longer content just to promote Prof. Skidmore’s incompetent survey but rather needs to one-up him with an even worse antivax survey. Truly, this bad survey virus produces brain-eating zombies.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

86 replies on “Just in time for Halloween, Mark Skidmore’s zombie antivax pseudoscience rises again”

One of the odd observations in the anti-evolution areas is that we see a good number of engineers “explaining” why evolution is wrong.

It’s a little interesting to me that two of the louder trolls here, lucas and igor, claim to be economists, and here we have skidmore, another economist — probably the only real economist of the three.

Nothing deep here obviously, but something that jumped out to me.

It’s been said an economist is someone who thinks a tree can grow all the way to the Moon if given enough money.

I was telling a business person about studies showing the planet running out of oil in the not-too-distant future. A few exchanges later he had a revelation: “Oh, you mean actual oil”! He was thinking about it as an economic concept.

The ‘C.M.O’ (cubic mile of oil) macro-economic metric should really be replaced nowadays. I’m struggling to find a catchy phrase though – ‘Mega Standard Wind Turbines’ doesn’t roll off the tongue so well lol.

It’s not actually “running out” that is the immediate problem, but no longer being able to power exponential growth. The Earth is not flat but it’s also not getting bigger, so an economy based on endless growth is no longer possible. Heresy. http://www.steadystate.org and http://www.postcarbon.org are good guides to that.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

It’s tempting to look at dominant thought patterns in an academic field when said field seems to include more than it’s share of folks who go wooey, either outside the boundaries of their discipline )engineering) or down a back alley inside a wide disciplinary purview (econ). [In addition to engineering and economics I’d add physics.] Not to totally discount that idea, I still note that there are very strong differences between how work in these fields works. What I’m more inclined to think at the moment is that for various and maybe quite different reasons, these fields seem to attract and, if not foster and reward, at least not appropriately challenge, people (predominantly men) with a high degree of arrogance.

In contrast, in my field (media/cultural studies) there’s no shortage of outre ideas, but the humanities typically fosters a level of humility. It’s overtly philosophical and speculative, so there’s this inherent typically tacit bracketing of ‘just something to think about, might even be wrong overall, but let’s see what the exercise jars loose.’ The prime example that comes to mind is Slavoj Zizek who frames provocative ideas from a self-deconstructive clownish persona.

Of course, every field has outliers, and there are certainly individuals in the humanities who loose that tacit understanding of conditionality, start taking things far too literally(?) and lurch from critical thinking into conspiracy theory, e.g. in media/cultural studies broadly, Naomi Wolf and Mark Crispin Miller. But my experience is that the majority of ‘stars’ in my field have been far more thoughtful and self-reflective, which doesn’t always come over on the printed page of an individual essay, but emerges either in person or in overview of their oevre.

Nothing deep or conclusive here either, just off the cuff response to your jumps…

@ sadmar:

You may have something there: certain fields attract the arrogant more.

Is it perhaps the nature of the material itself and how problem solving occurs? It seems that more definitive answers may be possible there rather than in arts/ interpretative studies, even life science…
ALSO may not societal/ monetary rewards be greater, attracting ” bigger game” than humanities et al?

At any rate, amongst all subjects, people generally can evaluate their abilities and weak points- even children can do this to an extent. Adults in university can usually judge where they excel and where they struggle. Many of these skills develop during adolescence ( metacognition, self-perception, skills of executive functioning, etc)
YET lots of people still miss the mark.

I venture that personality influences how they perceive themselves and their level of arrogance. When someone overgeneralises their estimated level of skill across disciplines to areas they didn’t really study it seems to hint at personality disorder or immaturity. Fledgling/ wannabe Nobel disease?

Maybe subjects like physics or maths require a confidence that can veer into arrogance.
Though to argue against myself, I haven’t really perceived the physicists I’ve known as arrogant (I’ve known a lot of physicists!)
and frankly I’ve found most people who do maths find it is basically humbling -and opens the mind very clearly to the possibilities
of ‘things I don’t know’ and ‘assumption is the mother of all fuck ups’.

I wonder if the apparent prevalence of engineers going down the woo path and/or appearing arrogant isn’t just because there are a lot
of engineers compared to other subjects – the ratio of arrogant dickheads need not be greater, just the absolute number.

I have experienced the sharp end of professional arrogance myself. I worked for a company building software systems for music tuition (British sense of ‘tuition’!), and I developed an algorithm for automatic transcription of guitar.
We were involved in a ‘crossover’ project with some seismologists, where we were supposed to see if any of the technology we had developed could be used to help them solve their problems.
Well we spent several meetings whereby these gentlemen from the Oil Majors essentially ‘explained’ their issues in a manner purely designed to make us understand just how difficult and beyond us their subject was. It became clear that they thought automatic transcription of guitars being played essentially comes down to ‘taking a Fourier transform’ ie first year physics (if that). Of course it isn’t (I will explain at length if anyone actually wants that :)- but they projected their lack of understanding of the complexities in a manner both insulting (I have BSc,Msc in Maths, my colleague a PhD in
Acoustics) and stupid – if its is so easy, and commercially very viable, why was it not already done?

Well the last laugh was on us – they spent so long trying to impress us how difficult their subject was (and by extension how incredibly bright they were!) that we only actually homed in on a problem
in the last couple of weeks, so they got charged £80k for essentially three pages of entirely speculative report that took me one night to write.

I got a second laugh a few years later when purely by coincidence I was employed by a top seismology consultant to develop some ground breaking technology which these gentlemen bought cos they couldn’t do it themselves.

Actually I have a little law in mind:

If you assume that intelligent people are equally attracted across all subjects it follows that where-ever the cutting edge of those subjects currently is at, it must in fact be equally ‘hard’ to progress.

If someone can find a way of stating that more pithily I’d appreciate it!

“You may have something there: certain fields attract the arrogant more”

I wonder if, instead, it’s the field that creates the attitude. Engineering isn’t usually a glamorous field and attracts people who enjoy solving problems with their head stuck in an electrical panel. On the other hand, being the person who solves intractable problems, or designs clever gadgets, for others, can be ego boosting. You can forget that you aren’t necessarily any more intelligent, you just chose a different field of expertise.

Thinking more about this…

I imagine that certain fields – physics especially- have cache as the realm of the super intelligent. In fact, all those who acquire a terminal degree are quite out of the ordinary. Intelligence measures more than one ability as tests show and I doubt that anyone can score really high and do poorly on any of the important measures.

HOWEVER, it’s quite another thing to generalise these abilities to life science where much of the relevant information is granular- “in the weeds”- where Orac often goes to explain why these contrarians are grievously wrong when they pontificate about vaccines or immunity because he knows details of research and the history of the field having worked in it for decades.
They leave out important information that is well known to people who study these questions every day.

For example, I always say that anyone who accepts vaccines cause autism is severely lacking in general information about how the brain develops because research shows that the architecture of brain structures involved in autism is determined prenatally and we’ve known this FOR DECADES from a confluence of data from different avenues of inquiry.

People can have good general insight but may not accept that they can ever be wrong because of their past history of success. I do believe that people from other fields can learn the important aspects of life science or else I would condemn Orac’s mission- educating the public about issues in medicine and biology -to failure. Some regulars @ RI are physicians, epidemiologists or biologists but others studied diverse subjects including engineering and computers and are able to comprehend and respond to scoffers really well.

Part of education is acquiring facts and methods but as people mature they usually learn to accurately assess their own skills and lacks as well as how they compare to others. I once listed warning signs that illustrate that someone is quite out of their depth:
vaccines cause autism; homeopathy works; vaccines worse than illness; diets cure cancer etc.
Orac added germ theory denialism.

You know, not being found in violation of IRB requirements is a pretty poor reason to celebrate. It seems like the minimum you’d expect from a scientist in terms of integrity – and I too am not sure if the IRB failed, or if it’s just that its review was narrow. But at any case, if this is Prof. Skidmore’s “achievement” it’s not very good.

And as you point out, it does not rescue junk science from being junk science, or an anti-vaccine journal from being just that.

I’ve been thinking about MSU (I’m only about an hour from there and grew up just north of East Lansing). The last few years it seems that just about all of the news out of the college has been about some massive screwup: Nasser, not releasing records of that investigation, the current board of trustees crap, of course the football coach stuff — none of it is a good look, and together it makes it seem as though every one of the different groups charged with governing procedures has gone to shit. This IRB thing is enough to make you wonder if the same rot that hit other areas has hit it.

@ldw56old

“Tech bro turned antivax influencer Steve Kirsch is claiming that Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore has been “exonerated” after having had a paper retracted claiming 278K deaths from COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 alone. In reality, Skidmore’s paper is zombie pseudoscience that’s back from the grave.

One of the odd observations in the anti-evolution areas is that we see a good number of engineers “explaining” why evolution is wrong.

It’s a little interesting to me that two of the louder trolls here, lucas and igor, claim to be economists, and here we have skidmore, another economist — probably the only real economist of the three.

Nothing deep here obviously, but something that jumped out to me.”

Ho, stop. This troll happens to be an engineer as well. And why would it be engineers explaining why evolution is wrong? Are you not able to?
Now I can imagine you even being an evolutionist. A blind believe in unproven theory suits you well.

People who understand the subject better will dismantle your arguments with ease. But suffice to say, if you think evolution is unproven, you are very wrong indeed.

Saying lucas has made a comment that’s wrong is like saying fire is hot — you’ll always be correct.

I think his evolution comment proves that he’s really just trolling: he has no understanding of the items he posts about, but for some reason continually asserts that his view is correct and all the experts, whether doctors, biologists, historians, political scientists, etc., are wrong or are paid to say things that are wrong. Notice also his claim [now] to be an engineer, putting himself among all the other overreaching engineers who “prove” evolution is wrong.

I have a feeling he’s an engineer in the sense that he has a small HO scale train setup in his basement, but even with that he had to have a lot of help to get it running.

Crank magnetism once again rears its ugly head.* Next we’ll be hearing about germ theory is only a theory and that no one has ever seen or isolated a virus.

*is Sherri Tenpenny the ultimate crank magnet?

Now I can imagine you even being an evolutionist. A blind believe in unproven theory suits you well.

Thank you for this. Now I don’t have to waste time and energy taking you seriously.

Thank you for this. Now I don’t have to waste time and energy taking you seriously.

We knew that as soon as he started spouting world-wide conspiracies and “nazis are leftists” BS.

Why did so many economists see through the Covid vaccine deception?

Very simple. Economists are taught facts pertinent to any industry:

1) People follow incentives (basic tenet of economics)

2) Commercial entities (like Pfizer and Moderna) always invest money into convincing people that their products are “safe and effective”, in order to sell them. This is called marketing, which economists know about.

3) Economists and business majors study decision making. Decision making studies cognitive biases, how to exploit cognitive biases, and how to recognize when cognitive biases are being exploited by unscrupulous sellers.

Any economist with an ounce of common sense would understand that no vaccine can “be developed in 2 days” and “tested in 97 days” (which was the average time for a subject in the clinical trial).

The “Covid pandemic” and “Covid vaccination” was a very unusual scheme that economists were uniquely suited to recognize.

Advanced economists would ask, why did the people who paid millions to develop the Sars-Cov-2 virus also worked on developing vaccines for it. And how come such extensive preparations were hidden from the public and everything was presented as a “surprise”, when it was anything but.

In investment management circles it is well known that doctors can be talked into all sorts of disadvantageous investment deals due to shortcomings of their education. Just FYI – for the doctors among the readers of this forum, be very skeptical of any “investments for doctors”, “investment firms specializing in medical doctors” etc.

So, that’s why most critically thinking economists saw through the deception.

Nowadays, economists see stocks of Pfizer, Moderna and BioNtech crater, and we smile knowingly, aware of what is to come.

“1) People follow incentives”

For some people – like doctors and medical scientists – that incentive is to help improve and maintain the public’s health. Such as the numerous medical scientists all over the world who dropped everything to develop the life-saving vaccines for a deadly infectious disease as quickly as possible without cutting corners.

“2) Commercial entities (like Pfizer and Moderna) always invest money into convincing people that their products are “safe and effective””

Which can actually be true, especially when backed up by overwhelming evidence in favour of that product being safe and effective, including the phase III clinical trials, and the post-marketing surveillance of over 13 billion doses of the vaccine, which demonstrated conclusively that the vaccines were, indeed, safe and effective.

“3) Economists and business majors study decision making.”

And the majority reach the correct conclusion that a product can be safe and effective even if the company selling it is motivated solely by profit.

“Why did so many economists [think they saw] through the Covid vaccine deception?”

Maybe because they did not have a knowledge and experience of recognised experts in all the relevant areas of science like epidemiology, virology, genetics, molecular biology, infectious diseases, and public health.

“Any economist with an ounce of common sense would understand that no vaccine can “be developed in 2 days” and “tested in 97 days””

And any economist who has even a basic knowledge of science would understand that “common sense” is not always a good arbiter in science. And any economist with the knowledge of the recognised experts listed above would understand that it was indeed possible to develop the basis of a vaccine within a few days of elucidating the genomic sequence of the virus, and that it was indeed possible to produce and test it within 10 months.

“In investment management circles it is well known that doctors can be talked into all sorts of disadvantageous investment deals due to shortcomings of their education.”

But it was medical scientists, not doctors, who developed the vaccines. Even if you meant medical scientists, what relevance does their investment knowledge and decisions have in their ability to produce and test a new vaccine for a new virus.

“why did the people who paid millions to develop the Sars-Cov-2 virus also worked on developing vaccines for it. ”

Now you’re just either blatantly lying or demonstrating that at least one economist does not have the first clue about science. Not a single intelligence agency in the U.S. believes the virus was genetically engineered. And all the scientific evidence is in favour of a zoonotic event at the Huanan market where wild animals were sold and slaughtered.

Oh dear me. Economists? That’s another group that frequently thinks they know more than they do. Thabo Mbeki, former South African President, is a textbook example. Aged just 24, he was awarded a Master’s Degree in Economics by the University of Sussex. He is also an AIDS Denialist who continues to insist to this day that the consensus that HIV causes AIDS is wrong. That he has no training in medical research doesn’t give him pause.
I would be careful.

1) Medical professinonals have duty of care. They cannot push things harmful to patient. Pharma payments to doctors are public data.
2) You do not rely on Pfizer’s word, RCTs are reequired.
3) MRNA vaccines were were not developed in 2 days (Where you get this). There were long research that resulted vaccines.
Who developed SARS CoV 2 virus ? An economist would do a budget. Bribing everyone cost much more than few millons.

Engineers do not understand evolution and confuse it with Epicurean materialism.

“It’s not the job of the IRB to police bad science except when the poor quality of the science endangers the human subjects in the study.”

Bingo! That’s why its NOT true that the IRB ‘exonerated’ Skidmore of “violating US regulations with respect to human subjects research”. To be exonerated you have to be accused of something, and unless I missed something I don’t see anyone accused Skidmore of breaching those regulations, as they only relate to protecting individual subjects from abuses, not making wackadoodle claims on the basis of idiotic extrapolation of anonymous survey data.

Actually, some of us did suggest that Skidmore might have violated human subjects protection regulations that the IRB is supposed to enforce. How? By going beyond the parameters of the submitted protocol and doing analyses that were not specified, which is always a no-no, as doing so misuses data meant for another purpose. Admittedly, what I’m describing is a bit of a gray area, but at the institutions where I’ve worked IRBs have been sticklers for not doing anything that isn’t spelled out in the protocol, even for protocols that they ruled to be exempt. Similarly, IRBs generally take a dim view of protocols that, exempt or not, misrepresent their purpose, as Prof. Skidmore’s almost certainly did given the evidence of his previous white paper that clearly looked like the basis of this study.

Slight but hopefully amusing digression:

The antivax Twitter critter calling itself “Jikkyleaks”, who spawned a small legion of followers identifying themselves with mouse graphics and endlessly promoting antivaccine bilge*, has announced is retirement from active proselytizing. Aside from comical self-glorification, irony meter busting and mixed metaphoring in its farewell announcement, the following passage may be of interest to RI readers:

“…the media gave a platform to the likes of David Gorski, Tony Fauci, Albert Bourla and Peter Daszak as if they were saints instead of the face of a global biomedical mafia. Their support group of minions who threaten scientists and non-scientists, scouring their personal files and tracking their homes, children and employers know who they are.** So do I. Everything is archived.”

Look out minions! It’s on the record – plan on wearing your best outfits for the Nuremberg II tribunal!!

*why the mouse brigade sees fit to identify themselves with verminous rodents is one of life’s minor mysteries.
**given the doxxing activities and harassment of grieving families committed by antivaxers, the projection here is stunning.

The now -“retired” mouse leader (said to be an Australian physician) claimed that influenza has been produced synthetically since 2002, to prop up influenza vaccine makers.

It has lots of followers, who must now feel adrift. Poor little rodents.

Well, if doing an unspecified analysis was a no-no under MSU’s standards and precedents, we could fault the IRB. But that sounds to restrictive to me. A researcher could certainly uncover something unexpected and significant in the data and try to learn from it in a perfectly above-board effort.

[My perspective on IRBs is influenced by having made and taught documentary film. Some institutions intimate that any project involving interviews or actuality footage of human beings needs to get approved by the prevailing IRB, regardless of the makers obtaining releases, which basically means you can’t make such films at all…]

Misrepresenting the aim of research to the institution is a different matter, but I’m not sure IRBs are the proper form of policing that. (Not that I have a better suggestion off the top of my head.)

Surveying alt med/ anti-vax sites introduces and re-introduces me to a variety of mis-informers as I learn that Dr Shiva Ayyadurai** is running for president .. of the US, that is, not his local school board or cat fancier society.. (SHIVA 4 PRESIDENT is his website): he was interviewed by Adams at NN.
Isn’t he the guy who aggravated Orac?

** Inventor of E-mail

As a side note:
whilst the crisis in Gaza rages and thousands suffer horribly, I notice that alt med/anti-vaxxers are taking advantage of this living nightmare because they know their audiences’ minds are preoccupied with news of the devastation and uncertain future so…
they speculate about the war, the history of the region and international reaction.

That’s right: they blather on cavalierly while people die and survivors face seemingly endless fear, pain, loss and deprivation.

Not only do they pretend expertise and predict scenarios that include nuclear war and international terrorism but they discourage followers from reasonable news sources which- in their jaundiced view- are biased, corrupt and worthless.
ALL of the alties/ anti-vaxxers/ contrarians I read/ watch ( websites, broadcasts, Substacks) regularly are doing this to some extent.
Keep people away from reality and invested in garbage so they’ll buy your products/ subscriptions.

What is happening in Gaza is a terrible tragedy that is also extremely toxic. I stay entirely out of it, personally. But my heart breaks for the people involved, who are, by the way, very far from perfect.

@ Igor Chudov

You write about people in Gaza: “But my heart breaks for the people involved, who are, by the way, very far from perfect.”

What an absolutely STUPID thing to say. I am Jewish, as an undergraduate became friends with a Palestinian working on a masters in anthropology who later went on to earn a PhD in anthropology from U of Wisconsin. When I lived in Israel, took bus from East Jerusalem, to Bir Zeit to visit him as he was on faculty there. Through him attended meetings of Israeli Jews and Palestinians who wanted one nation with absolute equality and citizenship for all. Found out later that Shin Bet (Israeli FBI) were at meetings and took down names, so I am probably on list of Jews who would not now be allowed to visit Israel. In any case, during my life I have met numerous Palestinians and, as with all people, they represent a wide range, from extremely intelligent to less so, from open-minded to close-minded, and everything else.

Israel is a neo-Nazis nation. Early 1900s Zionists murdered several thousand Jews, including Rabbis, who were friends with Palestinians. In 1930s Zionist did best to block Jews fleeing Europe from going to US, basically wanted young healthy ones going to Palestine. In 1948 when Israel declared independence, Jews from Yemen came. European Ashkenazi Jews saw them as inferior, only good for menial jobs, gave them far less support, housing, medical care, etc than Jews from Europe and when they gave birth, told infant died and was given to Ashkenazi family. And even today, Yemenite and Jews from Arab nations treated as second class citizens. Palestinians who are Israeli citizens live mainly in enclaves. Permits to build, for instance, second story to house denied. Funding for schools half that for Jewish schools, etc. And several thousand held in administrative detention without charges.

The current right-wing Israeli government has made it clear its goal it to drive Palestinians out of West Bank/Palestinian Authority so Jews can move in and become part of Israel. Same with parts of Gaza strip.

Zionistic Israel is a betrayal of Judaism. First five books of Bible have same saying repeated four times: “Be kind to the strangers in your midst for were you not strangers in the Land of Egypt.” Read: Rabbi Reuven Hammer (2016 Apr 21). The Status of Non-Jews in Jewish Law and Lore Today.

I could go on and on; but given you are closed minded, will ignore; but I highly recommend:

Thomas Suarez’s book “Palestine Hijacked”
and Carolyn Karcher’s “Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism”

You are basically confirming what I said, while simultaneously calling me STUPID?

@ Igor Chudov

You really are an IDIOT! What does “very far from perfect say?” NADA

Hi Denice
I’m not against vaccines. In fact, I have kept myself updated on the recommended vaccinations.
What reputable news sources do you use?
As far as Israel and the ongoing battles with those who are out to exterminate the Jews, this is prophetic. The Word of God has told us beforehand.
Isaiah 46:9,10
Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.

Without the faith of Christ I too idw56old could not understand the spiritual things of the Lord.
1 Corinthians 2:14
But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

Your unbelief will not prevent the Lord’s plan from being fulfilled.

No, rather the lack of evidence that this is actually indeed the Lord’s plan (or whether the Lord even exists) will make it incredibly unlikely that it will be “fulfilled.”

One should not get science nor diplomatic advice from a bronze age text by anonymous authors. Still an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth revenge mentality will make sure all are blind and toothless.

No go up this page and read what Joel wrote.

“But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Presumably ‘unnatural’ man is the future then….

Natural man isn’t really interested in he ‘things’ of the spirit of God since they are, indeed, foolishness to him and seem to be hallucinations of the mind.

Since I don’t get news alerts from the LORD**, I’ll stick with BBC, NBC, CBC, Al Jazeera, RAI, Le Monde, Die Welt, NHK English et al.

** probably non-existent

Denice does yeoman duty keeping the rest of us advised on what is happening in the DIS-reputable “news” sources. But this can be informed by major news sources including newspapers, wire news services, and broadcast networks NOT owned by the Murdoch’s.

But most of us prefer to use science to verify the truth or accuracy of statements about medicine and the related science. Unfortunately, too many of our current leaders think that a collection of 3000 year old scrolls trumps everything we have learned in the time since then including things that we can observe and test for ourselves.

As for the current situation in the Middle East, please keep in mind that not even all Christians share your pre-apocalyptic view of history. And insisting on that has a way of distorting our perceptions and warping our actions in a way that causes active harm.

If you want Biblical advice, I suggest re-reading Luke 10:25-37.

If the Jews treated the Palestinians the way it advises and vice versa, we wouldn’t have half the problems we are having now.

But politicians in all countries have a way of picking and choosing what advice they want to follow in a way that justifies their actions.

‘Nuff said.

@ squirrelelite

You write: “If the Jews treated the Palestinians the way it advises and vice versa, we wouldn’t have half the problems we are having now.”

Not the Jews; but the Zionists. Many Jews, for instance, in US, oppose Zionism and many Palestinians oppose HAMAS. I am Jewish and have met many Palestinians I would welcome as next door neighbors, etc.

I suggest, for instance, you check out website of Jewish Voices for Peace and read the books I suggested to Igor Chudov

Thanks for the clarification. I was speaking in general terms. If we could somehow achieve a peace between the non-Zionist Jews and the non-Hamas/Hezbollah/whatever Palestinians, then great.
Bur forces and foreign interests conspire against it.
I’m still working on Finkelstein, but I’ll keep those in mind.

@ Kelli

The “Bible” was written when primitive man thought only they existed. Didn’t even know about other side of world; e.g., China, Western Hemisphere, etc. Also, ignorant thinking Earth only planet, stars just lights in sky, etc. We now know of multiple universes, numerous planets, etc and we know about evolution, etc. And the Bible was written by different people at different times. Even creation story in Bible has two versions. And the G-d of the Bible is an anthropomorphic projection; that is, maybe larger, more powerful; but basically in form of man. I could go on; but for you to accept what I say would force you to reevaluate basically your entire self.

If something outside of time and space created this universe, it would NOT have the form of a superhuman! ! !

Now your brush is broad. The Road was active from the 2nd Century BCE on. And the NT was written in the 1st-2nd Centuries CE.

But I think we’ve both made our points.

While some antivaxers are wavering as to whether it’s more fun to spread anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim hatred (or both), others are firmly invested in blatherings to hearten anti-Semites. Natural News has been warning for days about how Israel is dragging everyone into WWIII and has an article up with “proof” of Israel having bombed a Gaza hospital, though evidence points to a failed Hamas rocket being responsible.

So Skidmore is on the “Science & Research Track” panel at the 2nd annual Children’s Health Defense Conference this weekend in Savannah, Georgia. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-conference/sunday-tracks-day/

Amazingly, this POS group of grifters (Brian Hooker, James Lyons-Weiler, Mark Skidmore, Christina Parks, Sabine Hazan, M.D., and Karl Jablonowski–all “PhDs” except for Hazan who is batsh*t crazy for an MD) somehow qualified to give physicians AMA PRA Category 1 CME credit.

Disgusting.

I’m shocked by what gets through, sometimes. There was a terrible “nutrition” course that qualified for 3 Cat 1 credits…one of the sections was titled “Everything we know about statins is a lie” I’ll try to find a link it was pretty amusing

@Igor Chudov

“Why did so many economists see through the Covid vaccine deception?
Very simple. Economists are taught facts pertinent to any industry:
1) People follow incentives (basic tenet of economics)
2) Commercial entities (like Pfizer and Moderna) always invest money into convincing people that their products are “safe and effective”, in order to sell them. This is called marketing, which economists know about.
3) Economists and business majors study decision making. Decision making studies cognitive biases, how to exploit cognitive biases, and how to recognize when cognitive biases are being exploited by unscrupulous sellers.
Any economist with an ounce of common sense would understand that no vaccine can “be developed in 2 days” and “tested in 97 days” (which was the average time for a subject in the clinical trial).
The “Covid pandemic” and “Covid vaccination” was a very unusual scheme that economists were uniquely suited to recognize.
Advanced economists would ask, why did the people who paid millions to develop the Sars-Cov-2 virus also worked on developing vaccines for it. And how come such extensive preparations were hidden from the public and everything was presented as a “surprise”, when it was anything but.
In investment management circles it is well known that doctors can be talked into all sorts of disadvantageous investment deals due to shortcomings of their education. Just FYI – for the doctors among the readers of this forum, be very skeptical of any “investments for doctors”, “investment firms specializing in medical doctors” etc.
So, that’s why most critically thinking economists saw through the deception.
Nowadays, economists see stocks of Pfizer, Moderna and BioNtech crater, and we smile knowingly, aware of what is to come.”

You’re spot on, Igor.
What we do instinctively is follow the money. This usually gives you 90% of answers to questions.
Not to mention that some parties were heavily invested in Pharma before the pandemic; I’ve always asked myself why that was and in particular cases why the philantropy. Philantropy is synonym for investment with higher return. The explanation followed.
I didn’t like it much either that Pfizer had been known for its criminal record; for what reason trust such parties.

Another advantage we had is we were already used to made up stories and lies from both public and private sector. I guess we distrust by definition. I specialised in Marketing Management with some years of psychology and sociology next to commercial economics. Since we know how to play people, it’s easy to recognise when other parties do the same. In this context, you will have noticed the much forced deployment of NLP techniques too, that our governments and institutes used. These ready-to-use methodologies were so soon in use and I don’t know about you, but it made me smell a bit of a rat.

I know for a fact that psychologists too realised there was something weird going on from the beginning of the pandemic. How was it possible that about all countries were so much in line on such short notice and followed the exact same strategy (like go for untested vaccines, play the crowd and play it in a similar manner). This would normally be impossible according to a psychologist-friend (who nevertheless took the vaccine with serious fatigue and not able to walk long distances as a result), yet it happened.

Hmm, how could such a thing happen? Who is controlling all of the governments in the whole entire world and making them act against their own best interests?

And why has there not been any large scale outcry yet?

Have you considered a possibility that all countries think that vaccines preven diseases ?
ell us more about your money following

@ Lucas

You write: “Advanced economists would ask, why did the people who paid millions to develop the Sars-Cov-2 virus also worked on developing vaccines for it.”

Orac and many others have totally debunked that Sars-Cov-2 was “developed.” Genomic sequencing of 10s of thousands of corona viruses found several requiring just a few additional mutations to become Sars-Cov-2. In addition, more than one virus can enter a cell, so two could exchange genetics. And on and on it goes. Economist normally don’t understand genetics, virology, epidemiology, etc.

I don’t think you have ever posted a comment on this website that had any validity. Do you understand genetics, microbiology, virology, epidemiology, etc? I doubt it! ! !

Do you understand genetics, microbiology, virology, epidemiology, etc

Give him some time and he’ll claim to have degrees in it, just as he’s already expanded to being an engineer.
The truth is that, just like Igor, the only thing he came away from his “education” with is the willingness to lie extensively about things he doesn’t understand but rather “feels” aren’t true.

Want to listen to economists?

Good.

Health economists say that the global Covid-19 vaccination campaign has saved 2.4 million lives.

“Our study shows the enormous health impacts of COVID-19 vaccines, which in turn have huge economic benefits,” Whaley said. “In terms of lives saved and economic value, the COVID-19 vaccination campaign is likely the most impactful public health response in recent memory.”

http://brown.edu/news/2023-10-30/vaccine-impact

Meanwhile, psychologists recognize something profoundly weird in the behavior of antivaxers, and are still working to characterize its nature and ill-effects. Jonathan Stea is at the forefront of this effort.

There is a reason why they ended their “analysis” so early…

Their “analysis is focused on the first 8 months of the vaccination campaign, we use data from March 2, 2020 to August 29,
2021” (page 6 of the underlying NBER article)

So they are ignoring the excess deaths, positively correlated with vaccine uptake, a trend started started in May/summer of 2022.

Vaccines reduced mortality in 2021, but increased it in 2022.

Vaccines reduced mortality in 2021, but increased it in 2022.

That is just plain wrong, so wrong it’s not even wrong. And you wonder why I don’t take your bleatings on COVID-19 vaccines seriously. FFS.

The longer you leave Igor to pollute the comments sections on your blog, the more likely it will be that he will end up quoting something that gets used as fuel by the antivaxxers…. and that will be YOUR fault for giving him a platform to do so. You WILL regret your tolerance for intolerance and ignorance. Hell, I think I even recently noticed you making just such a regret in a recent comment. Are you even capable of learning the lessons you yourself try to teach?
Why it is NOT good to publicly debate these charlatans? and yet, you do so in the comments section of your blog, every day. It is NOT educational to debate Igor. he is nothing but a constant fount of misinformation, that YOU give a platform to.

With Igor’s drivel debunked so quickly and thoroughly here, it’s hard to imagine it being much of an inspiration to potential followers.

Mainly he hopes to pick up a stray Substack admirer or two, to help pay for renewing his Epoch Times subscription and that giant can of Costco sauerkraut he’s been craving.

Meantime we get a look at what nonsense is currently in vogue among deluded antivaxers and useful practice shooting it down. The mental exercise helps keep one’s faculties sharp.

There’s also a HUGE difference between letting my regulars use Igor as a chew toy in the comments section and having a public “debate” with an antivaxxer on a much larger platform. I’m not so deluded to think that a huge number of people even read the comments here, much less contribute. I’m guessing that probably less than 5% of my readers, if even that, have ever commented here and that those who comment on a regular basis are probably well under 1% of my total readership, which compared to many antivax blogs isn’t all that huge anyway.

I view letting the odd antivaxxer like Chudov or LaBarge comment as providing practice and entertainment for my regulars. Only when an antivaxxer gets obnoxious or persistent enough to annoy me do I then ban that person. I’ll post a link to my comments policy again, just for emphasis:

https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/commenting-policy/

They still publish mortality data:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/monthlymortalityanalysisenglandandwales/july2023
“Accounting for the population size and age structure, the age-standardised mortality rate (ASMR) for July 2023 was below the five-year average in both England (776.3 deaths per 100,000 people, 9.0% below average) and Wales (893.9 deaths per 100,000 people, 2.3% below average); this difference was only statistically significant in England. ”
And:
T”he leading cause of excess death in England in July 2023 was symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions (which includes “old age” and “frailty”), at 107 excess deaths (9.7% above average); in Wales, it was heart failure and complications and ill-defined heart disease at 29 excess deaths (83.1% above average).”
Excess mortality reflects COVID peaks, not vaccine intake.

@ Dr Bacon:

Right. I’ve looked at his X ( Nitter.net/ fka twitter)

He discusses personality and cognitive abilities of anti-vaxxers/ CT believers as well as their usual mental state.
Similar results to sceptics’ suspicions:
Narcissism, suspicion, lower cognitive skills etc.

@Joel A. Harrison, PhD, MPH

“You write: “Advanced economists would ask, why did the people who paid millions to develop the Sars-Cov-2 virus also worked on developing vaccines for it.”

I did not write that, I quoted it.
In general I don’t write what I’m not sure about.

“Orac and many others have totally debunked that Sars-Cov-2 was “developed.” Genomic sequencing of 10s of thousands of corona viruses found several requiring just a few additional mutations to become Sars-Cov-2. In addition, more than one virus can enter a cell, so two could exchange genetics. And on and on it goes. Economist normally don’t understand genetics, virology, epidemiology, etc.”

This depends on what further education an economist has done.

“I don’t think you have ever posted a comment on this website that had any validity. Do you understand genetics, microbiology, virology, epidemiology, etc? I doubt it! ! !”

Is it relevant here, now? You had perhaps better put on some glasses while reading; it helps avoiding wrong conclusions and irrelevant questions.

@NumberWang

“So…not a real engineer then?”

For you I hope it’s real. Since the stuff you travel with, sit on, brush your teeth with etc. might have been designed be me. When it’s older, be more careful.

@Dangerous Bacon

“Want to listen to economists?
Good.
Health economists say that the global Covid-19 vaccination campaign has saved 2.4 million lives.
“Our study shows the enormous health impacts of COVID-19 vaccines, which in turn have huge economic benefits,” Whaley said. “In terms of lives saved and economic value, the COVID-19 vaccination campaign is likely the most impactful public health response in recent memory.”
http://brown.edu/news/2023-10-30/vaccine-impact
Meanwhile, psychologists recognize something profoundly weird in the behavior of antivaxers, and are still working to characterize its nature and ill-effects. Jonathan Stea is at the forefront of this effort.”

‘Health economists’, funny.
According to Joel economists are not allowed to express themselves on the health subject. You’re cherry picking.

“‘Health economists’, funny.
According to Joel economists are not allowed to express themselves on the health subject. You’re cherry picking”

Or you are.

@ Lucas

You write: “According to Joel economists are not allowed to express themselves on the health subject.”

NOPE. They are free to express themselves just as everyone else. I simply pointed out that approaching health from an economist point of view lacks validity. Why? Because economics is NOT a science, despite what economist claim. Science bases its findings on objective data and expert consensus. Economists represent a wide range of positions based partly on political positions. And political opinions include decisions of whose life is worthwhile, etc. Just as Orac allows people like you to comment, despite your ignorance about the underlying subjects; e.g., infectious diseases, immunology, etc.

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