Fake science and fake news make the perfect combo for your enslavement special. Guess who’s serving you today: the all-too famous Reuters.
The establishment propaganda outlet attempted to refute the February 18th report of dozens of deaths following the COVID 19 vaccination rounds at a nursing home in Spain. The reported death of 46 nursing home residents happened after they were vaccinated with the first dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine in January after which the many of the residents became “extremely ill”.
Leftist propaganda mobs, aka mainstream media went easy on the incident, but they had to counter the news when it came out in alternative news sources. So Reuters had to take all the time until March 2nd to put out a defense of the vaccine as they did a so-called “fact-check” story under the title “Fact check: Spanish care home deaths caused by COVID-19, not vaccine”.
The lame defense story of Reuters starts with the claim that the story of deaths in Spanish care home is a false claim. It goes on to claim that a spokesperson for the regional government where the incident occurred told Reuters via email that the deaths were caused by COVID-19 and not by the vaccine. No evidence is offered by Reuters to support this claim. But what they say next undermines their own story:
Even after a person is vaccinated for COVID-19, there are circumstances where it is possible to catch the disease.
How does it undermine Reuters’ own story? It happens that Reuters went on to link to another one of their stories that claim that the Pfizer vaccine is highly effective. The story they link to was published on February 24th and it cites a study that is a good example of pseudo-science, the kind so prevalent today that it has pushed the real science out of the frame. Let’s look at the study cited.
Published the same day (February 24, 2021) as the Reuters story promoting it, in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study by Israeli researchers titled “BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Mass Vaccination Setting” is made to sound like some solid independent verifiable replicable research in the news. But a quick look at the study reveals what it really is: junk science with no scientific value and big holes all along its details.
The study in question is termed as “observational study” by its executors and uses the Kaplan–Meier estimator to estimate – and I repeat, ESTIMATE – the effectiveness of the vaccine in people to whom it was administered. How can one scientifically do that is a question the study won’t touch because an estimate of something is one’s guesswork – whether you use a calculator or paper or just your memory to do it; it remains guesswork, not objectively verifiable scientific parameter that can be tested independently by other researchers. The credibility of this estimator was struck a blow in one health research published in the journal Rheumatology in 2000. I won’t be surprised to see more such daunts on the reliability of this statistical tool.
The Israeli guess work study got its data from Clalit Health Services (CHS) a health service provider heavily bent on vaccinations. You won’t be surprised that the study was exempt from the requirement for informed consent, per the study itself. Participants were required to “not having a previously documented positive SARS-CoV-2 polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test”. So if somebody was COVID positive and simply didn’t test, he/she passed for participation – and the study won’t know whether the so-called immunity was due to prior exposure or vaccination with the Pfizer shot. The study also says it won’t share raw data due not privacy concerns—in other words, no way to verify the original unfiltered/unadulterated data.
This is just the tip of the design flaws that the details of the study design reveal. But in addition to the purely assumptive nature of this useless study and design flaws, nearly all the authors of the study disclosed receiving grants from Pfizer “outside” the study – meaning they claim the fee/grant they got from Pfizer was not related to this study but for something else? What exactly? We won’t know.
The Israeli study presuming effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine is as much fake science as its Reuters version is fake news. Neither has credibility. So what do you guys think should be the score on Skepticle Scale here for both the study and Reuters story? Ok, I hear you: 10/10 and yes, shame, shame, shame!
Ernie's Take 
[…] in the Reuters story—and no surprises there since Reuters has been known to routinely spread false claims and vaccine advertisements masked as news. With no indication that this is a published […]
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