Given the results of the study below, would you recommend your pregnant wife to get vaccinated?
This is a study on rats with a very small sample. Such studies are used to establish the basic science and safety of a vaccine. Because the sample it small, it has a high âtype Iâ error rate, meaning itâs susceptible to false positive results.
If the effect in the human population were as strong as what is seen in this study, then we would have already sent massive negative side effects among vaccinated women.
I only gave the paper a cursory glance, so there could be more there of concern to specific women, and I donât have the expertise to evaluate that. I would still recommend the vaccine, and consult with an informed doctor about specific concerns.
That study is obvious nonsense, and anyone even vaguely familiar with the basics of the relevant research would recognize it as such.
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I was being generous, but the paper has zero citations, so it doesnât appear to be raising any alarm.
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The underlying problem is that if any such effect was caused by the vaccine (and that âifâ is doing a lot of work), actual infection would still necessarily be worse than vaccination.
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The pubpeer comments are something to behold.
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The major limitation of this study seems to me to be the overdosage of the vaccine.
It seems to me that both Springer and Elsevier journals have been getting a lot worse in the past few years.
Even if the data looked decent, this (and the absence of any response from the authors) would be enough for me to discount it:
At both of these sites, it seems that the first author describes himself as a co-founder of Scove Systems (and also states that he is involved with business development). As information about this company is difficult to find, perhaps it is no longer in operation, however if it is, I would suggest the authors consider whether the Conflicts of Interest statement in this paper should be amended. It currently reads:
âThe authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.â
In addition, it would be interesting to find information about independent validation about this artificial intelligence-based behavioral analysis system so that readers know whether the results of this system are reliable. I searched the Dimensions database and the only four peer reviewed papers mentioning this system included the first author as an author.
Not much in the way of ethics there.
Absolutely. The study is utter garbage, published in a garbage journal. The amount of vapid handwaving in the discussion (and conclusion) is astounding.
Youâd have to look at the data instead of only the words to know why. Your citation of it is a very strong indication that you ignore data.
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It was published 9 days ago, so it couldnât have citations even if it were the most brilliant paper ever written.
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Answer to question in the thread title:
Yes. Credible information on this topic is abundant and easy to find.
Yes. Credible information on this topic is abundant and easy to find.
Comments on this study:
TLDR: even if the effects are real, they are uninterpretable due to the laughable experimental design,
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It is not properly controlled. The control group received saline, controlling only for the physical injection. A properly controlled experiment would receive at least the vehicle (nanoparticles), and ideally would receive a dummy âvaccineâ (for example, nanoparticles containing a scrambled RNA sequence). If this were a clinical trial in humans, the placebo control would be adequate. But this is an animal study. In either case, we would be left with this important unanswered question: are the effects, even if they are real, due to the nanoparticles, or the mRNA, and if due to the mRNA, is that an effect specific to the sequence?
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Some on the forum will know that obvious crap like this paper will generate discussion at PubPeer. One of the most notable comments on this trainwreck is about their dosing, which is something I didnât notice until I read the comment: these guys gave a HUGE dose. This alone invalidates the paper and disqualifies the authors. (Specifically, the human dose is 30 ”g total, and thatâs the dose these bunglers gave to a rat.) My guess is that if they had given the same dose of a dummy vaccine, theyâd see the effects they measured, if in fact any of those effects are real.
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The behavioral effects are only in males. The person who posted this apparently didnât read far enough to discover that. PS the person who posted this is ignorant and duplicitous, constantly, on this forum.
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The methods to âdetectâ neurochemical changes are laughably crude (whole brain extracts, LOL), and the âmethodsâ for âhistopathologyâ even cruder. For the latter, there is no mention of blinding the observers. All they did was count cells in sections with crude stains.
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Thatâs a good catch. Large doses are a way to try to force possible negative effects to show up in animal models. That dosage would never see use in a human population, but it does help identify possible side effects to look for.
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That and several others.
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Oh my. I just read some of them. Something to behold, indeed. âEntertainingâ is the wrong wordâbut they are âcertainly somethingâ, at the very least.
I feel sorry for the rats. They are probably re-reading the fine print of their employment contracts.
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Iâm actually morbidly (heh) curious about the⊠erm⊠experiences of the rats. They received doses of lipid nanoparticle/mRNA that are at 200-400 times what a human is given (that range is 100-200 pounds for humans, and sadly Iâm⊠ugh⊠outside that range). Just boring old toxicity is a likely explanation for the effects and one hilarious remote possibility is that poor @Giltil will have to acknowledge that pregnancy is potently protective against the toxicity. LOOOLLLLL
The control is good for determining the safety of the vaccine package. Whether the effects are due to the nanoparticules, or the mRNA, or the spike protein, or something else are interesting questions but irrelevant to the safety issue per se.
I didnât notice the surdosage either, which, for sure, considerably weakens the reach of the paper.
Of course Iâve noticed that the behavioral effects are only in males; itâs even written in the title of the paper! But what is your point here?
Thatâs not what they claimed to be testing. Are you being intentionally obtuse, are you legitimately this confused by simple things?
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We might cir Gil a little slack here, I think. The importance of a proper control is fundamental to those who work in science, but not necessarily to others.
The key here is that a controlled experiment allows you to establish cause, and perhaps that is what you meant. Done properly it allows possible causes to be isolated. Normally this can only be done in a planned experiment. There are exceptions, but thatâs another topic.
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Sure. And the control used by the authors, a saline solution in place of the vaccine, is OK for a preclinical safety study.