Women making decisions about pregnancy on a non-peer reviewed study.
The Scotland study is not peer reviewed by Nature Communications, and fails to mention the most important point.
In the comments section on Jessica Rose’s recent substack, “31% of women who were exposed to COVID-19 products prior to pregnancy experienced a miscarriage according to VAERS domestic data” a very rude commenter called Wayne E repeatedly quotes a study using Scotland data, and claims this ‘peer-reviewed’ study proves that ‘data from Scotland specifically showed no increased risk of miscarriage after COVID vaccination’.
Well unfortunately there are a few problems with that study.
It does not say if people were considered unvaccinated in the first fourteen days.
The Scotland study study Wayne mentions https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33937-y does not say anywhere if people were considered to be unvaccinated during the first fourteen days after vaccination, as is the usual practice in most health statistics during the Covid era (some even counted vaccinated people as unvaccinated in the first 21 days). The study is worthless if this is the case, for it would mean the so called ‘unvaccinated’ cohort included many who had recently been vaccinated, and if there are a larger number of adverse events in the initial two weeks after vaccination, it could mean that many of the pregnancies lost in the ‘unvaccinated’ cohort were actually recently vaccinated women. Considering that the study compassed a period of merely 25 weeks, a period of 2 or 3 weeks in which a woman is counted as unvaccinated when she is really vaccinated means that results for 8 to 12% of the study period should be discounted; possibly during the period they are most likely to lose their babies. This may explain the disparity in statistics, where gynaecologists are seeing 30% miscarriage rates today, instead of the normal 3-6%.
They excluded women who had had SARS-Cov2 infections
Another slight confounding factor in the Scotland study is that they excluded women who had SARS-Cov2 infections, and we know from the massive Cleveland study vaccinated people are more likely to catch SARS-Cov2.
It was not actually peer reviewed, at least, not at Nature, and not at any journal that operates a trustworthy peer review process
What is particularly damning for this result is that the study Wayne mentions https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33937-y was NOT peer reviewed - the only peer review notes are as follows:
Editorial Note: This manuscript has been previously reviewed at another journal that is not operating a transparent peer review scheme. The manuscript was considered suitable for publication without further review at Nature Communications.
Though it is supposedly an open data study, the data is not easily available
As I find again and again with these supposedly open data studies that find SARS-Cov2 vaccine friendly results, the data is neither fully open nor fully available. Check it out for yourself.
The study has the fingerprints of the Wellcome Trust and unknown industry funders behind it.
Our thanks to the EAVE II Patient Advisory Group and Sands charity for their support. COPS is a sub-study of EAVE II, which is funded by the Medical Research Council (MR/R008345/1) with the support of BREATHE—The Health Data Research Hub for Respiratory Health [MC_PC_19004], which is funded through the UK Research and Innovation Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and delivered through Health Data Research UK. Additional support has been provided through Public Health Scotland and Scottish Government DG Health and Social Care and the Data and Connectivity National Core Study, led by Health Data Research UK in partnership with the Office for National Statistics and funded by UK Research and Innovation. COPS has received additional funding from Tommy’s charity. S.J.S. is funded by a Wellcome Trust Clinical Career Development Fellowship (209560/Z/17/Z). S.V.K. acknowledges funding from an NRS Senior Clinical Fellowship (SCAF/15/02), the Medical Research Council (MC_UU_00022/2) and the Scottish Government Chief Scientist Office (SPHSU17). K.B. is funded by a Wellcome Senior Research Fellowship (220283/Z/20/Z).
BREATHE is particularly opaque, for the industry funders are not mentioned anywhere on their website, yet their existence is acknowledged. The Wellcome fund, of whom Jeremy Farrar is director, Fauci’s co-conspirator in writing the study that whitewashed the lab leak origins, is particularly suspicious as it is an industry funded fund that tends to commission studies that strangely enough always end up supporting the prevailing narrative.
Addendum: using a matched cohort with such a large data pool could mean that the cohort is carefully matched to ensure a friendly result.
Considering the other points of dishonesty and doubt, the use of a matched cohort with historical data could possibly mean a cherry picked cohort for a predetermined result. Considering that the exact subset of the Scotland data used in the study is not defined, this is a distinct possibility that cannot be ruled out.
Nabin K. Shrestha,1 Patrick C. Burke,2 Amy S. Nowacki,3 James F. Simon,4 Amanda Hagen,5 Steven M. Gordon1 1 Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Bivalent Vaccine Departments of Infectious Diseases, 2 Infection Prevention, 3 Quantitative Health Sciences, 4 Enterprise Business Intelligence, and 5 Occupational Health, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio, USA https:// www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v1.full.pdf
Calvert, C., Carruthers, J., Denny, C. et al. A population-based matched cohort study of early pregnancy outcomes following COVID-19 vaccination and SARS-CoV-2 infection.Nat Commun 13, 6124 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33937-y
Andersen, K.G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W.I. et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat Med 26, 450–452 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41591-020-0820-9