Flawed scientific papers fuelling virus misinformation, endangering lives

WASHINGTON • Scientific studies with poor methodology and inaccurate findings are exacerbating a Covid-19 misinformation crisis that is discouraging vaccination and putting lives at risk.

The intense public interest in the pandemic and divisiveness in the United States over how to address it facilitates the spread of faulty research papers online, including by vaccine opponents. Even if a study is retracted, it is too late.

"Once the paper is published, the damage is irrevocable," said Dr Emerson Brooking, resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab which focuses on identifying and exposing disinformation.

"Flawed papers have been fuel to the fire for Covid-19 sceptics and conspiracy theorists. They are frequently the subject of viral online activity. Their findings are further filtered through salacious and misleading articles from fringe websites," he said.

Inaccurate information about vaccines is especially dangerous at a time when uptake of the shots has slowed in the US, where health officials say almost all recent Covid-19 deaths occurred among those who were not immunised.

The medical journal Vaccines published a peer-reviewed paper last month titled "The Safety of Covid-19 vaccinations - we should rethink the policy".

It concluded that Covid-19 vaccines were causing two people to die for every three they saved - findings that quickly spread on social media.

A tweet from scientist and Covid-19 vaccine critic Robert Malone summarising the paper garnered thousands of retweets.

A video in which conservative pundit Liz Wheeler discussed the study - she said it "will shock your socks off" - has been viewed more than 250,000 times on Facebook.

But Vaccines then retracted the paper, saying it contained "several errors that fundamentally affect the interpretation of the findings".

At least four Vaccines board members resigned as a result of that study's publication, including Dr Katie Ewer, a senior immunologist at the University of Oxford's Jenner Institute.

"It should have been recognised that this paper would have a big impact," said Dr Ewer, who was not involved in its publication. "That no one... picked up on that... is very worrying, especially for a journal dedicated to vaccines."

Scientific papers have been drawn into the public eye in "an unprecedented way", so experts must do a better job of explaining their work to a lay audience that may lack the skills to assess them, said Dr Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.

"Not all of the studies that have been produced and widely shared during the pandemic have been scientifically robust," she said.

"This is particularly troubling because poorly executed studies have proven to be capable of influencing individual-level decision-making during the pandemic."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE