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Orwellian Science During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Let us call Orwellian Science that in which the research or reports state an opposite or disconnected conclusion with respect to the reported data.

Orwellian Published Science

  • June 16, 2020 - Lyu and Wehby in Health Affairs: Community Use Of Face Masks And COVID-19: Evidence From A Natural Experiment Of State Mandates In The US1)
    • The use of face masks is judged in this study according to negativity of the second derivative of the infection curve (which necessarily goes negative) during a brief period during the first wave of the pandemic in the U.S. which first reached different geographies at different times.2)
    • Commentors at the published study noted other problems.
  • Aug, 2021 - Yeh and Contreras (preprint): Full vaccination against COVID-19 suppresses SARS-CoV-2 delta variant and spike gene mutation frequencies and generates purifying selection pressure3)
    • The data in the paper shows exactly the opposite of the title and conclusion claims.4)
    • The tweets saved to the preprint are a sad, but entertaining historical record of doctors and scientists uncritically tweeting out the paper to their subscribers.
  • Aug 18, 2021 - Li et al in Clinical Infectious Diseases: Intravenous Injection of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) mRNA Vaccine Can Induce Acute Myopericarditis in Mouse Model5)
    • The descriptions of the data often didn't match the data, they downplayed the harms of intramuscular injection of the Pfizer vaccine in the mice, some of the most important data was in the supplementary material, the scales in some of the charts were messed to downplay results that were inconvenient to the narrative that “intramuscular injection of the vaccine was ok/safe.” More here: We’ve missed the real story with this paper on the Pfizer vax
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