Thread by @GidMK

This appears to be a pretty straightforward case of p-hacking as described, except in the opposite direction - the authors kept hunting around until they found a NON significant relationship to put in the paper

https://twitter.com/lonnibesancon/status/1366892448732094465

Of course, the research letter that this is about, because it suggested that Swedish schoolchildren/teachers were totally safe from COVID-19, has been in dozens of news articles and has an Altmetric of 6,500 🙄

It sounds like the only reasonable course of action for @NEJM at this point is to place a notification of concern on the paper and investigate themselves

I mean, seriously, based on that correspondence the lead author knew that schoolchildren had excess mortality of 68% (unless combined with preschool kids), but this is what they concluded

Oh, forgot to mention that this lead author was also an original signatory/author on the Great Barrington Declaration

Reading the emails is incredibly stark. I cannot see any avenue but retracting this paper asap

https://twitter.com/galinash/status/1367052448381210628?s=19

Just to update, I'm not sure calling for retraction was justified. It does not look good at all, but the authors have updated the paper with this information now