Science is CENSORED: The Link between Covid-19 vaccination and miscarriages – paper withdrawn – My Comments

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[I don't know if some kind of censorship is going on. I'm suspicious. Jan]

A senior lecturer at the University of Auckland says he will retract a widely-criticised paper he co-authored after a head of department publicly rebuked him in an email to staff.

Dr Simon Thornley, an epidemiologist at the university, co-authored a paper in an anti-vaccination journal that was used to incorrectly claim a link between Covid-19 vaccination and miscarriages.

In an email to staff citing Stuff’s coverage of the paper, Professor Robert Scragg – the head of the School of Population Health, of which Thornley is a member – criticised Thornley and called on him to retract the paper “because of the anxiety it is creating for expectant parents and those planning to have a child”.

“I am taking the extraordinary step in my regular COVID email to publicly criticise a recent publication by a member of staff, because of the public furore this article has created and to confirm with staff that I do not agree with the findings from the article,” Scragg wrote.

Describing the paper as being published “in a low ranking non-indexed journal”, Scragg notes that studies have shown the miscarriage rate is the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

Thornley confirmed to Stuff on Wednesday that he had sought for the paper to be withdrawn.

It is rare for a senior academic to criticise the output of a direct colleague in such a public forum, and represents ongoing frustration among some university staff about Thornley’s views.

He was an early critic of the elimination strategy, which manifested through the Plan B group, which he founded. He has since pivoted towards criticisms of Covid-19 vaccines, and is a member of New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science (NZDSOS), a group that, in its online postings, has become increasingly conspiracy-driven.

Numerous public health experts criticised Thornley and Brock’s pregnancy paper after Stuff examined its claims.

It was co-authored by Dr Aleisha Brock, an epidemiologist based in Whanganui, and published in a journal founded and edited by an anti-vaccination campaigner.

The paper recommends withdrawing Covid-19 vaccines from all children, pregnant women, and people of “child-bearing age”.

It was said to be a reanalysis of an influential paper published early in 2021 by scientists associated with the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the US.

That paper was based on a database of pregnant people given an mRNA Covid-19 vaccine between December 2020 and February 2021. It concluded the rate of miscarriages among the vaccinated group was within the expected range.

Because of the study’s short duration period, it could only include outcomes for pregnant people vaccinated in the third trimester. The paper was later corrected to note this meant specific miscarriage rates could not be calculated throughout pregnancy.

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Thornley and Brock’s paper – which was completed before the correction, but published after – criticised the CDC paper on this count, and said it could not have concluded the vaccine was safe based on that data.

“The data presented in the original study could not be used to justify safety throughout pregnancy, and the authors needed to be more restrained in their conclusions,” Thornley and Brock told Stuff.

“That was our central concern and the fact that the article had not been updated after it was initially criticised by other groups was also of great concern.”

Their paper, however, went further.

Based on the CDC data, it recalculated a miscarriage rate for those who were vaccinated in their first and second trimesters: A shockingly high range of 82 per cent to 91 per cent.

Doing such a calculation, however, is mathematically meaningless. The only way for someone in their first – or early in their second – trimester to complete a pregnancy in three months is to have a miscarriage.

Thornley and Brock told Stuff they calculated and included that figure to highlight what they believed was an error in the original study – that it was wrong to make any miscarriage rate calculation based only on those who had completed their pregnancies in three months.

Epidemiologist Simon Thornley’s views on Covid-19 have put him offside with his colleagues.

Their figure was nevertheless plucked from the paper and shared widely as fact among anti-vaccination groups and associated media outlets.

It was even emphasised in the headline of the journal’s press release about the paper. The text of the release claims the paper “estimated that unexpected termination of pregnancies actually occurred at a rate 7-8 times higher in vaccinated pregnant women” than the baseline rate.

This conflicts with Thornley and Brock’s own explanation that the data could not be used to calculate any rate at all.

In remarks quoted in The Epoch Times, Thornley himself said his reanalysis showed vaccination early in pregnancy “indicates a substantially increased risk from background”, without noting that such a calculation is, by his own reasoning, useless.

The Epoch Times also quoted the researcher who first raised questions about the CDC study in June, who said he did not agree with Thornley and Brock’s paper, and had been satisfied with follow-up data released after the original paper.

A follow-up study using the same database, which covered pregnant people vaccinated earlier in their pregnancies who had since given birth, also found no increase in the miscarriage rate. It was published seven weeks before Thornley and Brock’s paper, but was not referenced.

Source: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/300456441/covid19-vaccination-paper-criticised-as-disinformation-is-being-withdrawn-coauthor-simon-thornley-says