The original paper was withdrawn by the editors of the another journal, citing
- Inappropriate citation of references.
- Inappropriate design of methodology.
- Errors, misrepresentation, and lack of factual support for the conclusions.
- Failure to recognise and cite disconfirming evidence.
The paper couldn’t even get through two sentences without a lie. It claims to be a “systematic review,” but does not contain requirements of a legitimate systematic review.
- It did not use a preregistered protocol such as on Prosprero.
- The search strategy was not comprehensive, using only “We searched PubMed and ScienceDirect.”
- Included studies did not undergo a risk-of-bias assessment
- There was no reproduceable inclusion or exclusion criteria beyond “autopsy studies (original articles, case reports, and case series in any language) that include COVID‐19 vaccine‐induced myocarditis as a possible cause of death.”
This approach allows for selective inclusion by the authors with a great deal of bias.
They also used circular reasoning in their assumptions. They claim that “We established that all 28 deaths were most likely causally linked to COVID‐19 vaccination.” They tried to confirm this through
- only including cases where the authors suspected vaccine involvement (selection bias)
- excluding autopsies where myocarditis was ruled out or determined to be due to other causes
- using three adjudicators for review who were not independent, but coauthors of the paper, which is a major conflict of interest.
The circular reasoning is this simple. “We only included cases where myocarditis might be due to vaccine and then concluded that that they were due to vaccine.”
They reference using the Bradford Hill criteria three times. This is nine criteria developed by Sir Austin Bradford Hill and published in 1965 to assess causality through an epidemiological lens. Bradford Hill states “is there any other way of explaining the set of facts before us, is there any other answer equally, or more, likely than cause and effect?”
The authors misuse the criteria.
- Case reports cannot be used with the Bradford Hill criteria.
- The criteria requires population level data, not anecdotes.
They use very questionable sources as evidence for their argument, but they are citing papers that would best be used to line a cat litter box if printed.
- Walach H, Klement RJ, Aukema W. The safety of COVID‐19 vaccinations—Should we rethink the policy? Sci, Publ Health Pol Law 2021;3:87‐99. RETRACTED “The article was evaluated by the Editor-in-Chief with the support of several Editorial Board Members. They found that the article contained several errors that fundamentally affect the interpretation of the findings.” Use the link to see further details on the retraction.
- Skidmore M. The role of social circle COVID‐19 illness and vaccination experiences in COVID‐19 vaccination decisions: An online survey of the United States population. BMC Infect Dis 2023;23:51. doi: 10.1186/s12879-023-07998-3 Retraction in: BMC Infect Dis 2023 Apr 11;23(1):223. RETRACTED “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.”
- Pantazatos S, Seligmann H. COVID vaccination and age‐stratified all‐cause mortality risk. Research Gate 2021. This was never published. Other authors have already debunked this preprint. “Beyond failing to control for COVID-19 rates and seasonal variability, they made unsupported claims about spike protein cytotoxicity and attempted to validate their findings by “herding” their results toward another flawed paper. They misused European data to extrapolate US findings and proposed Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) as an explanation for observed mortality rather than considering simpler explanations like waning immunity. Most tellingly, they could not explain why their claimed increased mortality only appeared in European data during weeks 0–5 post-vaccination and not thereafter.”
- Seneff S, Nigh G, Kyriakopoulos AM, McCullough PA. Innate immune suppression by SARS‐CoV‐2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G‐quadruplexes, exosomes, and microRNAs. Food Chem Toxicol 2022;164:113008. A letter to the journal editor by a number of scientists thoroughly debunks this hypothesis that provides no evidence for their conclusions.
The authors also misrepresent the pathology in some of these studies by claiming that they were caused by vaccine. Several of the patients had pre-existing heart disease, coronary artery disease, aortic dissection, human herpesvirus 6 (a known cause of myocarditis), and they didn’t rule out viral myocarditis.
In addition, they didn’t use a control group to compare baseline myocarditis deaths in unvaccinated individuals. This can occur after a number of viral infections, after influenza vaccination, spontaneously, in athletes, and in undiagnosed cardiomyopathy. Without these comparisons, there is no valid claim of excess risk or mortality related to baseline rates.
It’s also noteworthy that they use only 28 cases to make their claim, many of which could easily be due to other causes as shown above. The data simply does not support their claim that “the COVID‐19 vaccines would constitute the largest biological safety disaster in human history.” This is not science, this is politics.
Finally, there are major conflicts of interest by the authors. Hodkinson, Makis, McCullough are affiliated with The Wellness Company, who sells antivax products. Hulscher is a pawn for the McCullough foundation, so indirectly linked to The Wellness Company as well. These affiliations represent significant conflicts of interest that readers should consider when evaluating the authors’ claims.
