Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a few comments here and there asking me what I think about the new COVID vaccination study. And it was weird because I tend to be generally aware of research in that area. Not that I see everything as soon as it’s published, of course, but if something is on enough people’s radar that they comment asking about it, usually I’ve heard something. But in this case, there were several people talking about a new study on COVID vaccines and I hadn’t heard anything about it. What was going on?
Well eventually I figured it out: it’s because there is no study. There is only the ghost of a whisper of a study that could have been, and because our mainstream media outlets spent the past decade destroying their science reporting departments, they’re reporting on this ghost of a whisper as IF it’s a real study. And from there, the far-right anti-science anti-vaccination brigade has spread the good news: science says vaccines are bad, actually.
“Scientists find clues on why COVID vaccine causes chronic health problems in some,” says Fox News.
“Scientists Describe Rare Syndrome Following Covid Vaccinations,” reports the New York Times.
“Some People Have Rare Reactions to the Covid Vaccine – and Researchers Want to Know Why,” explains People Magazine. Sorry, “People Magazine?” Isn’t that the magazine for pictures of the new Bachelor and Royal Family babies? Jesus.
So what’s the story? Well, baby, it’s like mid-2020 all over again because we’re all looking at and talking about a pre-print.
“Pre-prints” are papers that an author puts online before it is accepted by a journal and goes through peer review. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with publishing pre-prints! In fact, posting a study in full online can allow for a more thorough peer review–instead of a paper being examined by a handful of people selected by the journal, a broad spectrum of experts can dissect it, compare notes, and improve the final product.
But it’s always important to remember that the preprint itself does not necessarily include any of that criticism, and you absolutely must always keep in mind that a preprint might have just been made up out of whole cloth. That’s why it’s absolutely fine to discuss preprints amongst people who understand what a preprint is, but it’s completely immoral for a mainstream news organization to report on the findings of a preprint for a mainstream audience and not mention that it hasn’t been published anywhere until the third paragraph, and to not mention the lack of peer review at all.
With that in mind, let’s talk about what this preprint actually says. It’s titled Immunological and Antigenic Signatures Associated with Chronic Illnesses after COVID-19 Vaccination, and accordingly it examines the people who say that they are suffering from an array of various symptoms that have lingered long after they were vaccinated against COVID-19.
In addition to being a pre-print, the authors make it clear that this is a preliminary study. That means that we shouldn’t expect to see large sample sizes, or strong and specific hypotheses and conclusions. Preliminary studies tend to be smaller, or find weaker effects, or explore a wider array of data, because the point is to provide a jumping off point for future research to dig into.
In this case, the researchers were hoping to encourage more study of what they term “post-vaccination syndrome,” which encompasses a lot of symptoms but by and large tends to resemble Long COVID: “exercise intolerance, excessive fatigue, numbness, brain fog, neuropathy, insomnia, palpitations, myalgia, tinnitus or humming in ears, headache, burning sensations, and dizziness.”
It wouldn’t be completely shocking to discover that a small percentage of people would suffer adverse effects after any vaccine. Vaccines interact with and stimulate our immune system, so of course there’s a chance for a negative event. It’s relatively common to feel a bit run down after getting vaccinated, or to have soreness at the point of injection. And in very rare cases, vaccines can trigger serious reactions, like seizures, or severe allergic reactions, that can even lead to death. Those reactions are so rare that it is way safer to get the vaccine then it is to risk getting the disease the vaccine helps prevent.
The reports of this Long COVID-type reaction after the COVID vaccine are also exceedingly rare, but they exist and so it’s important for researchers to study them and to help those people. So, the authors of this preliminary pre-print gathered 42 people who said they have “post-vaccination syndrome,” and compared them to a control group of 22 healthy people. They conducted a single blood draw on each subject and found certain immune differences between the two groups.
Still following? It’s a pre-print, preliminary study of 42 people who self-reported their vaccine history and their symptoms, and it found some differences between the immune system of those people and people who self-reported that they are healthy, after a single blood draw.
It’s already, quite obviously, not headline news. But it turns out that once we apply a little bit of peer review, even the small amount of data that’s there completely falls apart. Now, *I* am not a peer to these researchers and am wholly unqualified to review their data, so instead I’m going to refer you to Dr. Dan Wilson, a molecular biologist with a delightful channel here on YouTube called Debunk the Funk. I highly recommend you give him a follow and check out his Patreon if this topic interests you! But I’ll sum up some of his points.
Dr. Wilson points out that this study is so poorly designed that it doesn’t even do its job as a preliminary “hypothesis generator.” One of the big things that I completely missed is that these researchers said they took efforts to make sure that these people weren’t just suffering long COVID from, you know, catching COVID. But the test they used to determine whether or not the group actually had COVID at some point was flawed, to the point that even they admit that one person in each group tested negative for previous infection despite reporting that they had, in fact, had a previous infection. So there’s no way to know whether these people, who are reporting identical symptoms to long COVID, are actually just suffering regular old long COVID.
Wilson goes on to point out that the researchers chose a terrible test for finding “exhausted t cells,” and they further screwed up the method of trying to detect Epstein Bar, which is what causes mono and may be to blame for some of the symptoms being reported–turns out you need a baseline, so you can’t just figure it out from a single blood draw.
Again, I recommend you go watch his video to learn more about the various issues in this paper–as always, links to everything I discuss in every video are found in the transcript, linked in the doobly do and found at patreon.com/rebecca and skepchick.org.
But I’ll just conclude by attempting to answer a question Dr. Wilson brings up: when there are obviously better, more effective ways to gather and examine the data these researchers were looking for, why did they choose the sloppier methods? He mentions that one of the authors, David Putrino, has been on social media pushing supplements to “protect” anti-vaxxers from people who are “shedding” the vaccine in their presence, which is obviously all bullshit.
I’d like to add to that by pointing out some fun facts about the other authors. Danice Hertz and Brianne Dressen are part of an organization called REACT19, which according to their website provides “Science-based support for people suffering from long-term COVID-19 vaccine effects.” You know, the effects that we don’t even know exist yet and which this study was supposedly going to find preliminary evidence for. Don’t forget to swing by their merch shop and pick up a tshirt that says “Long Vax,” because yeah they’ve already coined all the lingo.
Helen Branswell of STAT noticed that at some point after it was published, the preprint was updated to include that information in the Declaration of Interests, along with the news that Dressen additionally “reports being a plaintiff in a lawsuit against AstraZeneca alleging breach of contract following her volunteer participation in 2020 in their COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial.”
So yeah, I have an idea of why these serious researchers failed to adequately present any decent data for their study: because they’re infected with anti-vaccine hysteria. And instead of doing the absolute most basic fact checking, outlets like the New York Times…and People Magazine I guess…have run to pile on to the anti-science paranoia that is literally killing people as I speak. People–children–are dying of vaccine-preventable illnesses because of this shit.
