Update: BMJ rejects - without review - paper highlighting problems with ONS vaccine mortality data

Previous blog posts here have discussed the various iterations of the work done by a group of researchers led by Prof Martin Neil looking at the ONS Vaccine Surveillance reports.

The original version of this paper** showed that idiosyncrasies in the ONS data on vaccine efficacy and safety could only be explained by systemic reporting errors which, when adjusted for, showed there was no evidence that the vaccines reduce all-cause mortality. Idiosyncracies included (among others) the observation that, in each age group, there was a spike in non-Covid mortality in the unvaccinated at exactly the same time as the vaccine roll-out peaked for that age group. This suggested the possibility that people who happened to die very shortly after vaccination were being misclassified as unvaccinated.

The paper got over 300,000 reads on Researchgate. While some disputed our findings, their objections were all based on the claim that the idiosyncrasies in the ONS data could be explained by the fact that the most unhealthy people were not getting vaccinated, i.e that there was a "healthy vaccinee" effect.

So, we did further analysis and produced the revised version of the paper showing why this healthy vaccinee effect was not supportable. Moreover, even if it were, it would still mean that all of the ONS conclusions about vaccine efficacy and safety were systemically flawed and biased because they failed to adjust for this effect.  

The only other type of criticism of the paper was that it was not peer reviewed – despite its many authors (including senior clinicians who had to remain anonymous to protect their careers) and hundreds of comments and informal reviews from researchers who read the paper on ResearchGate.

Of course, as has been noted many times here, the main journals (and even the pre-print servers medrXiv and arXiv) have been systematically rejecting papers without review if they challenge the 'official' Covid narrative. However, we did submit the latest version to the BMJ two weeks ago. Today they rejected it without review or any explanation why it would not be reviewed.

 

**Latest version:   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357778435_Official_mortality_data_for_England_suggest_systematic_miscategorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination 

"Official mortality data for England suggest systematic miscategorisation of vaccine status and uncertain effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccination",  Martin Neil, Norman Fenton , Joel Smalley, Clare Craig, Josh Guetzkow, Scott McLachlan, Jonathan Engler, Dan Russell and Jessica Ros. Jan 2022. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357778435_Official_mortality_data_for_England_suggest_systematic_miscategorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination

 Previous version:  http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.14176.20483