Kasper Kepp and John Ioannidis have published a preprint accusing The BMJ of “COVID advocacy” bias in its publications. Although The BMJ has been bad on COVID-19 and vaccines, in this case the “bias” is the rejection of COVID-19 minimization and “natural herd immunity.”
The BMJ, once a bastion of evidence-based medicine, has become disturbingly susceptible to publishing biased “investigations” that feed antivax narratives. Its latest report on VAERS by Jennifer Block, who in the past has defended Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop and whose history is not one of supporting science, is just another example of this deterioration.
Paul Thacker proclaims, “Vaccines are magic!” and likens them to religion that you can’t criticize. This is an old antivax narrative that he’s now parroting.
BMJ Senior Editor Peter Doshi published a preprint misleadingly “reanalyzing” phase 3 clinical trials to falsely conclude that mRNA vaccines to cause more harm than good. I sense…p-hacking. That, and comparing apples to oranges.
Recently, a claim that Pfizer’s own documents demonstrate that the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine was only 12% went viral. This is a slasher stat, so-named because like the killers in slasher movie series, even when it appears to be dead it always reappears to kill again. This particular myth originated in The BMJ in 2021.
