https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
There is a gawdawful anti-vax “paper” recently published in the European Journal of Epidemiology making the rounds, and if you haven’t seen it yet, your favorite anti-vax moron will be shoving it in your face any day now.
The word “paper” is in quotes in the paragraph above because while it’s formatted like a paper, it’s actually a letter to the editor, and does not appear in the list of published papers. (It’s unclear whether it was peer reviewed)
I was going to publish a dissection of this obnoxious paper (which is really nothing more than a scatter plot), then discovered that someone had saved me the effort.
(https://chatters.substack.com/p/european-journal-of-epidemiology)
I readily admit that when someone puts the letter to the editor in front of you and said “See? Vaccines don’t work, there’s proof!”, a better person than I would gently try to educate them on very, very basic analysis.
But I’m not that “better person”. If a person came to me with that letter to the editor and cited it as proof that vaccines are ineffective, I would simply write them off as incapable of reading and analyzing anything more complex than a restaurant menu and be done with them.
There is discussion elsewhere that the author of the original paper was only arguing for the continuation of non-pharmaceutical interventions among the vaccinated and never intended to mislead about vaccine efficacy. That’s a charitable but reasonable interpretation.
Anyone purporting that this paper supports an anti-vax narrative probably ought have adult supervision, and should be accorded all the respect they deserve.