The pre-print problem
Contrarians escape peer review by misinterpreting and amplifying small, cherrypicked pre-print studies
One of the disinformation doctors’ preferred methods to spread public health confusion is to bypass the peer-review process, a key tenet of scientific journal publishing, by discussing pre-print data directly with the general population on social media. Tracy Beth Høeg MD, PhD, a member of the anti-public health physician organization the Urgency of Normal, recently posted her analysis of a “stunning” pre-print study out of Thailand assessing cardiac complications in children following administration of the Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccine to her 49,800 followers.
Pediatric and adult congenital cardiologist, Frank Han MD, looked at the study and gave his appropriate assessment of the data within his area of expertise and found “nothing stunning to the trained observer”. For his full analysis see here.
Høeg’s Urgency of Normal colleague, UCSF’s recently promoted anti-mask oncologist Vinay Prasad MD, MPH, also amplified misinterpretation of this study with his 203,700 Twitter followers by sharing adult cardiologist Anish Koka MD’s Substack analysis.
The message was retweeted by Makary, a Fox News and Wall Street Journal contributor and Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) Covid advisor to his 179,300 followers.
They’ve run this ladder countless times to amplify disinformation. I’ve written about it once before on this blog. Høeg and Makary used cardiologist Peter McCullough MD, MPH in that instance.
Dr. Han had already published a piece on our Substack on pediatric myocarditis and vaccines and how it is being overblown by this same crowd. He translated it to Spanish as well.
Enough.
I saw Dr. Erickson ask reasonable questions spring 2020. Viral. Quickly banned on social media. Why? I followed him, others in Internet ghettos. They told me about Vit D.
Why didn't your experts?
What's up with recent concessions of Birx and wallensky? It's not criminal to be an idiot, except if you are giving orders to the nation on an experimental vax...
I hope they are tried and hung. If you publically urge mandates, I hope you are hung to.
Hi Allison. Just a comment from an amateur student of history.
You seem to be a bright, young and enthusiastic person. You are probably driven by a variety of motives guiding you. This is all fine.
But be aware that propagandizing covid vaxx in an aggressive manner, and picking fights with antivaxxers and begging authorities to deplatform them, is your right, but will unlikely to be helpful in your career. At best it will not help your career. At worst, who knows.
Tens of millions of people are seriously pissed off by having been mandated into a vaccine they did not want. Many of those same vaccinated people also had several covids by now and are asking how is that possible. A lot of people ascribe all their new ailments to the non-working vax that they were forced to take or cheated into taking.
They are putting two and two together and a wave of anger is building. Most twitter tags that are trending are related to covid vax. (they are pulled down fast but still)
Someone will certainly exploit that anger. How this will end up, is not yet known. But you may end up suffering for what was possibly just a randomly and unthoughtfully chosen direction on your part.
We are living in a historically unprecedented moment, when science and technology resulted in a lab-made plague virus, and a "vaccine" that made people uniquely susceptible to having same virus repeatedly, and they had bad health outcomes because of it.
This has never happened before and the outcome is unpredictable.