How the Transmogrification of Merely Incompetent Research Can Fuel Conspiracy Theories Beyond One’s Wildest Dreams: The Case of the Shoddy BMJ ‘Excess Deaths’ Paper and What the Data Really Said

If there were ever a competition for scientific papers that should not have seen the light of day, one that would stand a good chance of winning carries the title, “Excess Mortality Across Countries in the Western World Since the Covid-19 Pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ Estimates of January 2020 to December 2022,’” which appeared in the British Medical Journal, a highly respected organ first published in 1840 as the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal.
The paper questioned why excess deaths in Western countries remained unusually elevated during the pandemic even after vaccines were introduced in early 2021 and the implication was quite clear: Rather than reducing cases and deaths, the vaccines had resulted in a significant increase, somewhat akin to the recent research that suggests that a major shift in global shipping regulations intended to improve air quality may have temporarily –  and inadvertently – set off a geoengineering reaction that is warming the planet.
This is the finding that was embraced by the Telegraph and, thanks to the miracle of telegraphic technology, also by the New York Post. Since then, the anti-vaccine camp has gleefully foisted this finding on an unsuspecting and somewhat ignorant public.
Indeed, on the topic of ignorance, no less than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent presidential candidate in the United States and a known anti-vaxxer, promoted the study’s “findings” on his campaign website.
There’s just one small problem – well, okay, perhaps not so small: There is no truth to this so-called finding, nor is there any validity to the anti-vaccine camp’s interpretation of the BMJ paper. Some fairly eminent researchers are loudly suggesting that it never should have been published, while others are demanding a retraction.
One critic in particular, Ariel Karlinsky, an Israeli economist and statistician who developed the World Mortality dataset and whose data comprised the core of the paper by Saskia Moskert, Marcel Hoogland, et al. Karlinsky is, to put it mildly, hopping mad.
Karlinsky has written that the BMJ should retract the paper and “open an inquiry into what happened there with editors and reviewers” [presuming there might have been some, that is].
Stuart MacDonald, a respected actuary who has studied this type of data, referred to the story as “the awful BMJ excess deaths article.”
It’s important to remember how dangerous disinformation in public health can be.
In early June, in these pages, albeit in the U.S. Pandemic News section, mention was made of a new study published in the journal Science, which found that truthful yet misleading Facebook posts did more to drive vaccine hesitation than outright fabrication.
The study, entitled “Quantifying the Impact of Misinformation and Vaccine-Skeptical Content on Facebook,” looked at factually accurate yet deceptive content and its effect on the vaccine decision-making process.
While content that was flagged by fact-checkers received only 8.7 million views in the period covered by the study, some 0.3% of vaccine-related content, while stories that were not flagged but still implied that vaccines were harmful, such as the story of a young, healthy individual who died after receiving the vaccine – many from credible news sources – were viewed hundreds of millions of times.
The researchers at the University of Pennsylvania  and Massachusetts Institute of Technology found vaccine-skeptical content reduced vaccination intention by 2.28 percentage points per Facebook user, compared with −0.05 percentage points for flagged content—a 46-fold difference.
In this case, the transmogrification of the BMJ-published paper, which makes reference to “serious concerns” about the impact of vaccinees and “containment measures” such as lockdowns on excess deaths into a headline that read “Covid Vaccines May Have Helped Fuel Rise in Excess Deaths” is exactly what these researchers were talking about, and if Tom Lehrer were still writing his pithy satirical ditties, he’d no doubt have titled one, “Transmogrification.”
Of course, once the fox is out of the bag and the cat is out of the henhouse, none of this really matters as the damage has been done. As I am often fond of saying, and forgive me, dear reader, for quoting myself: “It’s just spilt milk under the bridge.”
Any questions?
(Photo: Accura Media Group)