WHOOPS!
MSU economist?s article stoked COVID vaccine fears. Now it?s being retracted.
Highlights from the article:
Skidmore?s article ... was shared furiously by vaccine skeptics in the weeks after it published. So furiously, in fact, that Altmetric ... now ranks the article 846th out of the 23.5 million piece of published research it tracks.
Great, so we have junk science jamming the airwaves. And?
But, on Tuesday, BMC Infectious Diseases retracted it.
The journal said in a retraction note that Skidmore had made ?no attempt to validate reported fatalities? and that there were ?critical issues in the representativeness of the study population and the accuracy of data collection.?
Validate, schmalidate, data is data, right?
Skidmore based his work on an anonymous survey of 2,840 people. Respondents who said they knew someone who had suffered health problems after vaccination were asked to describe the problems of the person they knew best.
In all, the respondents said they knew 57 people who had died from a COVID vaccine, according to the paper, though there was some latitude in what Skidmore counted as a death caused by the vaccine. Answers such as ?cancer retu[r]ned in his body spread all over,? ?death from a heart attack after vaccination by a few weeks,? and ?the shot made it worse. The[y] lose energy and the end result was death? all made the cut.
...
Skidmore extrapolated that to get a figure for the nation as a whole and also factored in deaths reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which is open to reports from anyone and is not verified.
Which is how he came up with the 278,000 figure.
So, not only did he base a study claiming 278,000 died from the vaccine on anecdotal evidence from 57 out of 2,840 recipients & anonymous reports online, he apparently sent the survey to the spartanmacks and tigermuds of the country, not, like actual intelligent people.
This part... why is it we kept seeing this happen with anti-lock down, anti-masking, and now anti-vaccine writing?
A draft retraction notice from the journal that Skidmore posted online also says, among other things, that Skidmore ?did not describe in detail the potential conflict of interest of the funder of the study,? the antivaccine activist Catherine Austin Fitts, who has said falsely that COVID vaccines are ?full of these mystery ingredients and change and modify your DNA.?
Fitts, who served as assistant secretary of housing and urban development under President George H.W. Bush, donated $11,000 to MSU to pay for just the survey portion of the study, Skidmore said.
The whole thing was funded by $11,000 from some hack antivaxx activist?
Fuck. MSU should boot this clown from its faculty.
They'll probably honor him during a football game though. Mel Tucker will invite him to stand on the sideline.
