A study by New Zealand’s Beverley Lawton et al. ‘proved’ that receipt of the HPV vaccine reduced preterm births.
However, when statistical sleuths questioned the data, the study was retracted, as it turned out that the findings were inverted – the HPV vaccine was actually associated with increased preterm births. The story of the retraction is quite scandalous and is worth exploring.
The study purported to provide “findings” of reductions in preterm births among HPV-vaccinated mothers.
Supposedly, vaccination “reduced” very preterm births (under 31 weeks) by 23% (77% odds ratio circled in the picture below).
However, in the retraction notice, the authors were forced to admit that the “findings were inverted,” and the data showed the opposite.
In other words, the data showed that the HPV vaccine increased the chances of very preterm births.
The authors’ retraction statement says:
This paper is being retracted at the request of the authors. The authors report that there was an incorrect interpretation of the odds ratio meaning that instead of HPV vaccination potentially being protective, there may be an associated increased risk of preterm delivery.
Then, backpedalling started:
The authors believe that an increased risk of preterm delivery is unlikely and not consistent with the evidence to date. Further, the authors have not been able to access the original source data as per protocol to check the data validity. The authors wish to repeat the study to reassure themselves that there were no data processing or other errors in the databases in order to reach definitive conclusions. [emphasis added]
Did the authors lose their raw data? It is hard to believe. Okay, what was the source of the data?
The source was not some rogue database administrator; the NZ Ministry of Health itself provided the data.
The NZ Ministry of Health had no problem initially providing the data to authors setting out to prove that the HPV vaccine was safe and effective.
When the study authors admitted that their “inverted findings” accidentally implied that the HPV vaccine increased early preterm births, the NZ Ministry of Health refused to provide those data again for reanalysis. I guess, the NZ Government frowns upon questioning vaccines, truth be damned.
One of the co-authors blamed an unspecified “stats PhD candidate” for the error:
A comment to the retraction notice questions the “inexperienced PhD candidate” explanation:
The study’s lead author, who also initiated it, Professor Beverley Lawton (pictured above), hid from editors and reviewers that she is financially sponsored by the rights holder to the vaccine.
The researchers, from New Zealand, also failed to appropriately disclose their financial ties to a company, CSL Limited, which owns the rights to the HPV vaccine in Australia and New Zealand.
The scandal happened during the peak of Covid hysterics in 2020 (the original paper was published in 2018) and would have gone unnoticed and forgotten had it not been for a friend of this blog, Arkmedic, who recently mentioned this amazing story on Telegram. (Please subscribe to Arkmedic’s Substack.)
NZ still recommends the HPV vaccine and refuses to release the data that, when appropriately un-inverted, shows an increase in the chance of very early premature births for HPV-vaccinated mothers.
Would you recommend the HPV vaccine to future mothers? Were mistakes honestly made?
This article was first published on Igor’s Substack page. Subscribe here.
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Wouldn’t the saturation effect show in a fairly simple lab experiment?
Chris Morrison’s explanation of the CO2 saturation effect caused me to remember using infra-red spectroscopy in my early career as a lab technician. If the sample was physically too thick I couldn’t measure the relative strength of the absorption at the various different frequencies. The only way to take a meaningful IR spectrograph was to make the sample thin enough for the available energy from the source to make it through.
Basically, we’ve got so much CO2 in the atmosphere (the article implies 400ppm) that it absorbs all the available IR energy from the source (the Sun) at the relevant frequency of CO2. More CO2 can’t absorb more IR as it’s already absorbing all the energy at that frequency.
Yes, a simple lab experiment will show this effect but…
And “system science” may well be the best way of modelling climatic changes, since it involves a huge number of variables. If that is the case then the question should be: has this “system science” yet been put into effect, and if the answer is yes, then why does the public face of the “settled science” surrounding humans’ impact on climate change, and consequent green policymaking, been only about one single element (CO2)?
The IR energy comes from the earth, not the sun.
It seems to me that net-zero is now a religious apocalyptic death cult and is impervious to any rational arguments or experimental data.
”And the perverted fear of violence chokes a smile on every face
And common sense is ringing out the bells
This ain’t no technological breakdown, oh no, this is the road to hell”
Every time I play Chris Rea’s ‘Road to Hell’ those words strike me as being not just a forecast but alarmingly accurate.
Thanks for the reminder.
95% of Co2 is emitted by Gaia.
98% is reused.
It is a trace chemical of 0.04% weight. Ergo, heretofore it does not trap a f*ing thing.
Co2 falls out of convection climactic systems.
It is part of the process to make oxygen.
It is a benefit not a threat or toxin.
There. Science closed.
(Now please grant me my pretty happy dude degree and lots of money.)
Haha..I would love to get a ‘Happy Dude Degree too, Ferd! Yes, I completely agree with you. Down here in sleepy Dorset we are planning a public debate with a group who claim to be all about sustainability (and Net Zero). The good thing is that they are willing to at least engage and encourage it in fact. I don’t wish to use the term ‘useful idiot’ (although I just did!) but many of these people who are helping to construct the prison around us seem to be ignorant of any science or rational arguments that counters their view, such has been the success of people like Attenborough, Thunberg, Gore etc. They do not delve any further nor do they join up any dots because that would be a ‘conspiracy’! Anyway, the more we can have open discussions, the more we can begin to understand where we’re all coming from and the more hope we have of averting the social suicide of Net Zero.
I look forward to reading your report on the encounter Aethelred.
Give em hell!
Perhaps you could get the attached junior school poster printed up and put on a wall as a simple visual to help with the ‘debate’.
Yor are one big happy dude mate! Well said
Yep.
https://madhavasetty.substack.com/p/a-convenient-lie
Excellent example
Trillions of dollars, many years and uncountable populations dragged into poverty, we get from this:
To this: (spot the difference)
Well put. It’s not just that it’s a trace element that makes up a miniscule percentage of atmospheric composition, It’s also the fact that all we’ve done is tweaked one single variable! In the formidably complex dynamic system that is the climate, we’re being led to believe that we can just dial down the CO2 a bit and it’ll all be fixed!
If someone (government) pays me money to find purple horses I might not be in a big hurry to say I cannot find any. I might string the search out month after month and year after year and issue occasional reports on my “findings”.—– I might report that “my studies are not inconsistent with the likelihood of there being purple horses”. I might insist that ” Purple horses are highly likely (80% probability) etc etc etc. ———Ofcourse it could be that I am simply taking advantage of the political desire to find these horses. I after all have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. ——-In the real world scientists also have families to feed and mortgages to pay, and if government are going to make that easy for them by dishing out taxpayers money to any and all scientists (climate modellers) who will come up with reports and studies that arrive at the desired conclusion that humans are warming the planet and causing dangerous changes to climate then why would those scientists not take advantage of that? Infact before all the climate change science scooting up to number on in the science charts in around 1990, not many of those scientists were interested in this issue, but once government started chucking money around they became like wasps at the jam jar.———- But at the end of the day we can all argue about the science day and night and never get to the bottom of it. The alarmists can speak of runaway global warming and increasing extreme weather events (that are not happening). They can rant on about “saving the planet” and millions of climate refugees That is not happening) etc etc etc. Sceptics will talk of there being no Hotspot in the troposphere which would indicate that any warming isn’t likely to be because of greenhouse gasses. They can speak of the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere being logarithmic rather than linear, etc etc —–We can all have a punch and Judy show about it all day. ————-But CO2 apart from being a greenhouse gas that might cause a little bit of warming, is also something else. It is the one gas that can be directly tied to Industrial Capitalism, and that is what this issue is really about. It is about the world’s wealth and resources in a world where there are now 8 billion people all wanting to use the finite fossil fuel resources in the ground. We in the wealthy western world are to stop using those fuels because the UN and it’s IPCC say we have used up more than our fair share —(Climate Justice). To get away with fobbing western populations off with heat pumps instead of gas central heating and taking away their perfectly good petrol and diesel cars, stopping us from flying and eating beef and lamb etc etc you need a very plausible excuse, and that excuse is CLIMATE CHANGE. You don’t need any evidence for it. All you need is AUTHORITY. On the issue of climate we now live in a scientific dictatorship.
Well said, varmint! The blinkers are slowly coming off a lot of the population but probably not fast enough. I am encouraging debate with those who have us all swapping our cars for EVs and shutting down town centres as they are trying to do here in Dorset. Once an idea has been introduced that it is the ‘good thing’ to do to eliminate emissions to ‘save the planet’ – all the worthy virtue signallers jump on it, aided and encouraged by a corrupt MSM and all the MPs. It also becomes an unstoppable train because anyone who goes against it is seen as ‘unreasonable’, ‘a bit of nuisance’, ‘a conspiracy theorist, or, alarmingly, ‘an extremist’. Whenever I’ve seen footage of XR or JSO (bought and paid for) activists being interviewed, they do not have an argument. It is mainly headline stats they’ve not bothered to really research plus a lot of emotional content. In fact, I would venture to say it is mainly emotional. No substance. People even view these people being arrested as draconian or fascist leanings by the state – even when they’ve blocked the road for days or spoiled people’s enjoyment in some way. The Guardian (that bastion of Woke) loves this type of stuff. All in all, it is a shrill, vain attempt, in my view, to appear relevant and emulate the radical student movements of the 1960s, but not be aware of how it is all part of a bigger agenda in play. It’s this lack of awareness by these young people that is worrying. They seem to be unable to really focus on what is going on and to join up all the dots.
Thanks——-Young people are always the easiest to brainwash, but you see a lot of easily manipulated older people sitting in the road as well. There is always a section of society that will fall for the propaganda hook line and sinker. But what I find amazing is that today government are trusted less than they have ever been apparently. No one believes what they say on Foreign Policy, on Immigration, on Education on Crime etc etc etc, and yet on climate people somehow believe it all, manly because they think it is all about science. They don’t realise that all the climate science is actually funded by the same governments that they don’t trust on every other issue. So what you see is people gluing themselves to the street because they think a climate apocalypse is about to occur all based on the bought and paid for “official science”.
Well ,would you believe it?
That looks to me like a virtual horse. But then that is what climate change science really is isn’t it? ——-Computer models are Virtual Science.
It is the one gas that can be directly tied to Industrial Capitalism
That’s not really true. Humans are (and have been for a while) using fire as source of energy and fire is an exothermic reaction turning carbon contained in a suitable material into (gaseous) carbon oxides. This more general focus is reflected in the Cooking on wood fires kills peoples! stories targetted at the so-called developping wolrd. The other exothermic reaction humans have so far managed to utilize is nuclear fission. Unsurprisingly, so-called environmentalists hate that, too, and should we ever manage to use controlled nuclear fusion for anything, the anti-life preaching of these people will reach a whole new level.
But the UN is not in the business of retrospectively taxing stonage people with a carbon tax. CO2 can be directly tied to industrial capitalism because, the wealthiest emit the most CO2, and the poorest emit the least for obvious reasons. Wealthier people have bigger houses, use more energy, drive more, fly more etc etc. When Edenhoffer of the IPCC said “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policies are environmental policies anymore, we redistribute the worlds wealth via climate policy” what do you think he actually meant? —–Climate Change policy is eco Socialism. That is why it is the left and the One World Government people at the UN who embrace climate policies. It has little to do with climate. But actually I am pretty sure you already know that.
“Professor Stephen Schneider who promoted the saturation hypothesis in the early 1970s when the global temperature was falling, but switched suddenly to the tenets of anthropogenic warming when it started to rise.”
First earth day, 53 years ago and the sea comes up to same level in skegness that it did when I was just a nipper! Shock horror! Headline news! Nothings f-ing changed!
Another paper offering support for this theory of Saturation appeared in Junk Science and was led by Dr David Coe , a British atmospheric research bod.
It would be really helpful to get rid of all of these scientifically meaningless titles and degrees like professor of global change. The proper term for this kind of change is politics, hence, political activist on university payroll would be a much better professional occupation description.
Schneider is proof that you can become a revered and famous scientist by predicting catastrophe from cold, or catastrophe from heat, but not by saying nothing particularly catastrophic is on the cards.
“ Since greenhouses gases such as CO2 are estimated to have raised the temperature of the Earth by 33°…”
?
Do I detect a missing decimal point, like it should be 3.3?
Schneider died from hypothermia. Did you know 5 out of 3 scientists struggle with fractions.
And what is the going rate required by a scientific institution to switch from forecasting an ice age to catastrophic global warming?
Like many on here my awakening to the modern state and its manipulation of evidence came through Lockdown. I was completing a masters degree in behavioural economics. I expected the academics teaching us about evidence and rigour to poke holes in the pandemic response. Surely we could do a CBA of the economic damage. Not a bit if it because the funding spigot was turned on and they were allowed to work from home. When i asked one at a re-union why they didn’t he said because we are not natural scientists. When i explained that we were supposed to explore and explain decision making his response was chilling. ‘I am not about to deny this department opportunities because some people don’t trust governments’ .