Risk of vaccine-resistant variants highest when most jabbed: Flawed scientific papers fuelling misinformation

Washington: Scientific studies with poor methodology and inaccurate findings are exacerbating a Covid-19 misinformation crisis that is discouraging vaccination and putting lives at risk.

The intense public interest in the pandemic and divisive debate in the United States over how to address it facilitates the spread of faulty research papers online, including by vaccine opponents. And even if a study is retracted, it is too late.

"Once the paper is published, the damage is irrevocable," said Emerson Brooking, resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which focuses on identifying and exposing disinformation.

Flawed papers "have been fuel to the fire for Covid-19 skeptics and conspiracy theorists. They are frequently the subject of viral online activity. Their findings are further filtered through salacious and misleading articles from fringe websites," Brooking told AFP.

Inaccurate information about vaccines is especially dangerous at a time when uptake of the shots has slowed in the United States, where health officials say almost all recent Covid-19 deaths occurred among those who were not immunized.

Medical journal Vaccines published a peer-reviewed paper in late June titled "The Safety of Covid-19 vaccinations -- we should rethink the policy." It concluded that Covid-19 shots were causing two people to die for every three they saved -- findings that quickly spread on social media.

A tweet from scientist and Covid-19 vaccine critic Robert Malone summarising the paper garnered thousands of retweets. A video in which conservative pundit Liz Wheeler discussed the study -- which she said "will shock your socks off" -- has been viewed more than 250,000 times on Facebook. But Vaccines then retracted the paper, saying it contained "several errors that fundamentally affect the interpretation of the findings."

At least four Vaccines board members resigned as a result of the study’s publication, including Katie Ewer, an associate professor and senior immunologist at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute. "It should have been recognized that this paper would have a big impact," said Ewer, who was not involved in its publication. "That no one at the journal picked up on that... is very worrying, especially for a journal dedicated to vaccines."

Malone’s tweet about the paper is no longer available, but Wheeler’s video still appeared on Facebook weeks later. The Gateway Pundit, a website that frequently publishes inaccurate claims, reported earlier in the year that a Stanford University study found mask wearing, which US health authorities recommended to help slow the spread of Covid-19, to be "ineffective" and harmful.

The study -- "Facemasks in the Covid-19 era: A health hypothesis" -- was subsequently retracted by the journal Medical Hypotheses, which said it selectively cited published papers and included "unverified" data.

The Gateway Pundit’s article -- which has been shared tens of thousands of times as a link or screenshot on social media -- was updated to say the study’s author was unaffiliated with Stanford, but it failed to mention the retraction.

Some of the biggest scientific journals, including The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, have retracted papers related to the coronavirus crisis, and even a limited number of faulty studies can cause extensive damage online.

Scientific papers have been drawn into the public eye in "an unprecedented way," so experts must "do a better job" of explaining their work to a lay audience that may lack the skills to assess them, said Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at the Harvard Medical School.

"Not all of the studies that have been produced and widely shared during the pandemic have been scientifically robust," Majumder said. "This is particularly troubling because poorly-executed studies have proven to be capable of influencing individual-level decision-making during the pandemic, including those pertaining to vaccination."

Meanwhile, relaxing restrictions like mask-wearing and social distancing when most people have been vaccinated greatly increases the risk of vaccine-resistant variants of the virus that causes Covid-19, new research showed on Friday.

At a time when nearly 60 percent of Europeans have received at least one vaccine dose, the authors said their modelling study showed the need to maintain non-vaccination measures until everyone is fully jabbed.

To predict how the SARS-CoV-2 virus might mutate in response to vaccination campaigns, a pan-European team of experts simulated the probability of a vaccine-resistant strain emerging in a population of 10 million people over three years.

Variables included vaccination, mutation and transmission rates -- including recurring "waves" of infections and falls in cases in response to lockdowns. Predictably, the model showed that a rapid rate of vaccination reduced the risk of a resistant strain emerging.

But in what the authors called a "counterintuitive result", the model showed that the highest risk of resistant strains emerging came when a large proportion of the population was vaccinated, but not large enough to ensure herd immunity.

This is in essence where much of Europe is currently, where the Delta variant is spreading rapidly. In a related development, the Philippines will send more than 13 million people in the national capital region back into lockdown next week, the government said Friday, as it tries to head off a surge in cases of a hyper-contagious coronavirus strain.

Experts have warned of an explosion in infections fuelled by the Delta variant that could overwhelm hospitals in the coming weeks if restrictions are not drastically tightened in the crowded capital.

"We had to make this difficult decision in order to save more lives," President Rodrigo Duterte’s spokesman Harry Roque said on government television. Restaurant dining and mass gatherings have been banned with immediate effect and a two-week stay-at-home order will start on August 6, Roque said.

Meantime, anyone entering Germany from abroad will have to take a Covid-19 test unless they are fully vaccinated or have recovered from the disease, according to new rules signed off by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet Friday.

"From August 1, all people entering Germany will be obliged to have proof of a negative test, vaccination or recovery," Merkel’s spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said in a statement. "This rule is there to keep the number of new infections brought into Germany as low as possible," said Demmer, adding that it would apply to all travellers over the age of 12.