Dr. Bhattacharya bravely stood silently behind Trump as the President demonized the MMR vaccine, multiple other vaccines and the vaccine schedule that were developed to balance & optimize overall public health goals in the US. All changes prioritizing the fantasies of anti-vaccine obsessives. He also continued the false claim that COVID vaccinations increased miscarriages in other interviews.
Pace Monty Python’s Holy Grail:
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
Bravely ran away, away!
When danger reared its ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin!
My first thought is that this is–and I double checked as a second thought–a non-peer-reviewed preprint. And I don’t think it’s message got picked up much further (outside of conspiracy theory influencers and websites) because it stands in direct opposition to much larger scale and vastly superior studies. I can’t speak as someone within the field but it sounds like this stands in direct opposition to the general consensus of the broader scientific community. (And even with my very limited familiarity with the structuring of medical studies, I can see a lot of questionable methodology here.)
In a quick search I found much larger scale studies which aggregated data from over a million pregnancies. And they found no such patterns. A small observational study like this distributed outside of peer-review doesn’t impress me.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 itself definitely poses significant risks of preterm birth and various other pregnancy complications. That sounds to me like a vastly greater set of risks to be avoided.
Nobody claims that vaccines (or most any other medical intervention) comes with zero risks. Isn’t everything ultimately a risk-versus-reward ratio analysis?
From what I can tell the study compared observed versus expected fetal loss rates using a regression model trained exclusively on historical data from 2016-2018. Isn’t this a classic temporal confounding? (Is that the standard term in biostatistics? My last relevant grad course was in 1983, I think.)