Unhelpful, inflammatory Jama Network Open paper suggests that people in Red states dream up vaccine injuries

Not only are the methods poor, the interpretation is biased

Trust in science is in free fall. It is particularly low among conservatives. If you ask me: loss of trust is well earned, as the pandemic revealed that scientists suppressed legitimate debate, and the major policy positions— school closure, masking, vaccine mandates— were all ineffective or worse.

How to rebuild trust? By doubling down on petty partisan politics, according to a new JAMA NO paper. Here it is:

And here is how it was framed.

The article claims that people in Red states report more vaccine injuries than people in Blue states. It concludes that either Republicans are more likely to “perceive” injuries, or Dems less likely.

But for stat, Eric Topol — remember him— he frames it as a Republican issue.

Now let’s turn to the paper. Here is what the authors find (weak correlation btw voting and vaccine injuries) , and here are the issues.

1. These data are ecological. It doesn’t prove that republicans themselves are more likely to report vaccine injuries. It would not be difficult to pair voting records with vaccine records at an individual patient level if the authors wished to do it right— another example of research laziness.

2. What if republicans actually DO have more vaccine injuries? The authors try to correct for the fact by adjusting for influenza adverse events.

Let me explain why this is a poor choice. The factors that predict whether someone has an adverse event to influenza vaccine may not be the same as those that predict adverse events from covid shots. It could be that there are actually more covid vaccine injuries in one group than another— even though both had equal rates of influenza injuries.

Another way to think of it is, there can be two groups of people and you can balance them by the rate with which they get headaches from drinking wine, but one group can be more likely to get headaches from reading without glasses because more people in that group wear glasses. In other words, states with more republicans might be states with specific co-morbidities that predict COVID vaccine adverse side effects but not influenza vaccine side effects. We already know that COVID vaccine injuries do affect different groups (young men, for e.g.).

3. The story is framed as Republicans are more likely to imagine injuries, but the truth is Dems might be more likely to brush them under the rug due to misplaced loyalty to our lord and savior St. Anthony of Fauci. Dems might suppress real injuries.

4. I would LOVE to see the same analysis run for long COVID. Strongly suspect that being Republican is a protective factor against the development of long COVID

   Speaking of long COVID, this is what the NY Times reporter says. It is pretty incredible to see someone taking so much unproven medicine. Totally reckless to tweet this.

   

Overall, JAMA NO continues a trend of punching at Republicans with bad research— this is likely bad for trust in science, and will not end well.