Thread by @han_francis

#vaccineswork this is yet another example of write your conclusion and then fashion an article. @DrSusanOliver1

https://twitter.com/FLSurgeonGen/status/1578515633159180289?s=20&t=Hx9fVQBMOm-vmVMDrIF2kA

. @FLDeptofHealth tried to analyze deaths after COVID vaccination starting from their rollout till June 2022. 🧵(1/9)

Their group created a non-peer reviewed study which was just published on the website, by searching people who received vaccination via FLSHOT (the vaccine registry), death records data, and the Florida Merlin database (a previously established database for reportable epi ).(2/9)

The statistical method is the self-controlled case series method, which basically means you compare subjects to themselves while tracking what happens after exposure to your event of interest (reasonable method to use to study this issue). However, several biases exist.(3/9)

Having filled out death certificates myself, there are primary and secondary causes of death. The team here selected a range of cardiac diagnoses, regardless of whether they were the primary cause of death (meaning you can die of a blood clot but also have mild myocarditis).(4/9)

PSA: You can have mild troponin elevations even after soccer matches, and asymptomatic viral myocarditis. Neither of these things kills patients. If Ladapo were a cardiologist he would know this but he is either intentionally hiding this or just not knowledgeable enough.

If they had actually reviewed charts, this bias could have been better controlled. FLDOH has the ability to do this, including the ability to call cardiologists to help, but we have no evidence of this. (5/9)

Next, vaccine uptake in Florida lagged behind the rest of the nation for quite a long time, due to the efforts of @FLSurgeonGen and others like him to dissuade the citizenry from taking these vaccinations. We don't see any obvious effort to control for this. (6/9)

Next, they explicitly say that if they remove the analysis that included the older segment of the population (closer to 60y), their results are no longer statistically significant. Combined with COVID testing snafus in the beginning, the picture is even more clouded. (7/9)

Naturally, there is no attempt to reconcile their result with the results of any other Dept of Health across the globe, which disagree with their writeup (including their own citation no2, a better designed SCCS on the same question which is here (8/9) medrxiv.org/content/10.110…).

I wouldn't mind a better SCCS designed to speak to this question directly, and agree that isolated deaths have been reported after mRNA vaccination, but this project in its current format doesn't stand up to the task. (9/9)

Also:

https://twitter.com/jsm2334/status/1578563551681466368

referencing @HealthyFla, the agency that put out the report

example of much better done study:
jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…