The Censorship of Covid Science: Three Examples

Censorship in science shows up in numerous forms:

• Ignoring, marginalizing, finding excuses, prioritizing, silencing - always in the name of rigorous science, of course.
• Three "letters to the editor," a format that allows unsolicited scientists to comment on a published article
• Submitted to three leading medical journals, these letters pertained to studies from Israel about the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine
• If accepted for publication, in most cases the authors would have been asked to respond
• All three letters were rejected

First letter (New England Journal of Medicine, March 2021)

• To the Editor: COVID-related death is subject to misclassification and hospitalization is a crucial endpoint of the trial
• The study by Dagan et al. (1) on the effects of mRNA-19 vaccine should have included two crucial endpoints: all-cause death and any hospitalization

Second letter (The Lancet, October 2021)

• Authors should abide by their own methodological standards
• The study by Barda and colleagues of a third dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine excluded events that occurred during the first six days of follow up
• Although the study groups were carefully matched, residual confounding bias can never be excluded in observational research
• One method to detect such bias employs "negative controls"
• In brief, researchers estimate the effect of the intervention on an outcome for which the effect is expected to be null

Third letter (The British Medical Journal, June 2022)

• This letter was submitted as a "Rapid Response" to a news item.
• Title: Vaccine effectiveness studies from Israel suffered from severe misclassification bias of the mortality endpoint
• The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) estimated excess deaths versus COVID deaths in various periods, but the ministry of health reported only 1,641 excess deaths
• Half of the deaths were not caused by COVID and could not have been prevented by the vaccine
• Misclassification was probably differential depending on vaccination status
• Rejected letters need not be buried forever, and editorial decisions can be judged in the public domain, like the case here. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-censorship-of-covid-science-three-examples/