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
  • December 14, 2021 - Patone et al. A paper published by University of Oxford researchers purported to show that myocarditis was a worse risk for persons who suffered from COVID-19 than those who received vaccines.6) However, the study is problematic on several levels because
    • The study did not even include a cohort that was not vaccinated.
    • Cases not diagnosed in a narrow window were excluded from calculations.
    • No correction was made for the probability of a symptomatic COVID-19 infection.
    • Study authors noted numerous meaningful conflicts of interest.
  • December 27, 2021 - Frederik Plesner Lyngse et al in medRxiv Preprint 7): SARS-CoV-2 Omicron VOC Transmission in Danish Households
    • The abstract and conclusion indicate that vaccination and boosters provide some protection against household transmission. However, all mention of transmission data and rates in the entire paper (including charts) refer to combined Delta and Omicron variant data. There is only one comment in the entire paper that refers to secondary attack rates of the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated separated by variant and it states: “Unvaccinated potential secondary cases experienced similar attack rates in households with the Omicron VOC and the Delta VOC (29% and 28%, respectively), while fully vaccinated individuals experienced secondary attack rates of 32% in household with the Omicron VOC and 19% in households with the Delta VOC. For booster-vaccinated individuals, Omicron was associated with a SAR of 25%, while the corresponding estimate for Delta was only 11%.”
    • This statement reveals that there is a higher Omicron secondary attack rate in the fully vaccinated (2 doses) households and near identical Omicron secondary attack rate in boosted households and unvaccinated households.
    • If one simply reads the abstract and the conclusion/discussion, this important point, specific to Omicron, would be missed.
    • It is interesting that the authors comment mainly on vaccinated vs unvaccinated transmission data using Delta and Omicron data combined when the title of the paper mentions nothing about the Delta variant.
  • April 25, 2022 - Impact of population mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated subpopulations on infectious disease dynamics: implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission8)

April 2020 COVID-19 Defies ALL Rules of Virology

Received on 27 April 2020; received in revised form, 12 August 2020; accepted, 16 August 2020; published 01 September 2020

Dhadse et al., IJPSR, 2020; Vol. 11(9): 4104-4113. E-ISSN: 0975-8232; P-ISSN: 2320-5148 International Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research 4104 IJPSR (2020), Volume 11, Issue 9

THE NOVEL CORONA VIRUS (nCoV2) SEEMS TO DEFY ALL LAWS OF VIROLOGY

P. V. Dhadse, Kiran Sethiya -, Chitrika Subhadarsanee and Khushboo Durge Department of Periodontics, Sharad Pawar Dental College, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences (Deemed to be University), Sawangi (Meghe), Wardha - 442001, Maharashtra, India

ABSTRACT: Amongst the known coronaviruses, many were responsible for causing disease in humans knowingly from the common cold to acute severe respiratory syndrome. The novel coronavirus, nCoV-2 has been implied to cause increasingly severe damage to public health besides demolishing the global economy with a staggering figure of continuous rise in mortality within the afflicted cases in almost every country on this planet.

Owing to the perplexed scenario there are growing challenges involved in the containment of the spread of this novel coronavirus, which is mounting to be numerous and continuous. The battle is still on with this nCoV-2 since it has evolved, presenting with initial flu symptoms in patients affected to atypical pneumonia mimicking a catastrophic disseminated intravascular coagulation stage leading to cardio- respiratory abnormalities thus assuming proportions of mysterious illness to very unusual symptoms encountered in different age groups.

The genomic analysis of the nCoV-2 has revealed constant potential mutations with the evolution of different strains, thereby posing numerous challenges to develop an effective vaccine that will hold a promise on providing long term immunity to the host.

This review critically analyzes its arrival and spread across the globe to almost entire virology of this novel coronavirus to challenges that might be encountered in the future even if the vaccine is ready to combat the virus.

COVID-19 also resembles the same illness as affected by SARS -2003 virus 12. The first infection was unofficially reported from Wuhan city of China 13 have occurred on 17th November 2019. However, the official reported infection with first symptoms came from 4 workers within the same region of seafood wholesale market on 8th December, 2019.14

The mysterious illness was thought to have evolved from animals which had caused mutations in the virus to affect the humans and related with animal coronaviruses like SARS (2003) and the mortality rate was up to 10% for SARS CoV and up to 37% for MERS CoV 11, 15. It has turned out to be deadliest amongst the known coronaviruses affecting global population so far!

The COVID-19 virus appears to be fiercelyinfectious, dreadful as it is making the countries across the globe to count daily new infections and deaths and push the tolls.

This article reviews the entire virology of this novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2; including its origin and arrival after mutation, how it is different from other coronaviruses, the possible mechanism of making their ways into the human cells along with other potential characteristics and possible ways which perhaps would help the research workers to develop the long term effective vaccine against COVID-19.

Tracking the “nCoV (SARS-CoV-2)”: Origin of COVID-19 Pandemic: How the Pandemic has Spread?)

The COVID-19 outbreak came without warning and spread like wildfire across the world by building a chain and clusters of transmission at different geographic locations.9)10)

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