A data scientist and viral immunologist are questioning the results of a recent study that found that mixing with the unvaccinated increases COVID-19 risk for vaccinated people..“As a researcher who has published and reviewed many scientific papers, I can tell you the article by (David) Fisman, et al. is the worst one that I have ever seen,” said Byram W. Bridle, a viral immunologist and former professor at the University of Guelph..Joseph Hickey, executive director at the Ontario Civil Liberties Association, said the paper’s authors are “either incompetent or disingenuous,” and that the media’s disproportionate coverage of the study, “risks causing societal vilification of people who have refused the medical intervention aggressively promoted by governments and large corporations.”.The research, published Monday in theCanadian Medical Association Journal, found vaccinated people who mix with the unvaccinated have a greater chance of being infected than those who spend time with people who have received the shot. The study was covered by virtually every mainstream media outlet in Canada on Monday..David Fisman, study co-author and professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana school of public health, acknowledged that the paper’s “simple mathematical model” does not “fully reflect the real world or the diverse factors that must be taken into account when setting public health policy.”.Bridle called the paper “thinly veiled hate speech under the guise of science,” and said it is littered with “massive errors.” These include incorrectly assuming the vaccines offer full, sterilizing immunity; not modelling the real-world phenomena of waning immunity from vaccines; assuming without evidence that booster shots provide restored protection against the Omicron variant, and.not mentioning the safety issues around COVID-19 vaccines..Bridle also noted the paper’s assumption baseline immunity among the unvaccinated is only 20%, whereas another peer-reviewed study showed that number was closer to 90%. Bridle claimed by adjusting the single parameter to better reflect real-world data, virus transmission in the model then occurs disproportionately from vaccinated people, thus completely reversing the conclusions of the paper. .“The ‘peer reviewers’ of this article should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to be published, and the editor even more so,” Bridle said. “I honestly believe the authors need to be investigated, as does the editor who allowed the paper to be published.”.When Hickey examined the article, he found its main conclusion, that risk of infection among vaccinated people can be disproportionately attributed to unvaccinated people, to be incorrect according to the model..Hickey said Fisman and his colleagues, “concocted a new parameter, never before defined in the scientific literature,” which they called the ‘unvaccinated contribution to infection risk.’ He said they then incorrectly characterized their own parameter and used it as the only basis for their main conclusion..The parameter was said to mean, “.a normalized index of the degree to which risk in one group may be disproportionately driven by contact with another,” but Hickey pointed out the model is blind as to “.whether the ‘contacts’ in the normalizing denominator are infectious or benign, irrespective of vaccination status.”.Hickey said the journalists who reported on the study, the vast majority of whom don’t understand data analysis, should have “.recognized their limits and sought expert counter opinions before participating in their mobbing of unvaccinated people.”.Hickey also pointed out that Fisman has served on advisory boards related to influenza and COVID-19 vaccines for Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Seqirus, and Sanofi-Pasteur Vaccines..Matthew Horwood is the Parliamentary Bureau Chief of the Western Standard.mhorwood@westernstandard.news.Twitter.com/@Matt_HorwoodWS
