Long Post – Vaccination Censorship
It has been four years since the world was saved, or not, by miraculous Covid mRNA vaccines.
It has also been several years since my first letter on the topic was rejected by an editor of a biomedical journal. And my case series of rejected letters on Covid vaccines keeps expanding. The score is now 5:0. The last rejection recently came from the editor of the Journal of Infection, where “Each issue [also] brings you…a lively correspondence section.” My lifeless letter referred to a study of the healthy vaccinee bias in Austria.
Is my case series large enough to infer causality? Perhaps it is. Of course, the common cause could have been poor-quality science. May I offer, perhaps, one refuting observation? My second letter (rejected by The Lancet) would have exposed in 2021 what Høeg et al. exposed in 2023 in a letter that somehow got into The New England Journal of Medicine. A careless editor, I think. Maybe he or she is no longer an editor.
I am sure that my fifth rejected letter was just another badly written text with no scientific merit. For sure it had nothing to do with the possibility that the letter, along with the authors’ response, might have led to disturbing findings. So, let me share my letter here. You will be the judge again: worthy or meritless?
To make it more interesting, I will include an analysis that was mentioned in the letter (without my revealing the scary result). It was not difficult to compute, however. The paper shows evidence of vaccine-related deaths—from Covid—within two weeks of an injection in people who were previously infected. Or let me state it more conservatively: The evidence is at least as good as the paper’s evidence for vaccine effectiveness against Covid death in fall 2021.
The Letter
May 15, 2025
Journal of Infection
To the Editor:
Riedmann et al. report a thoughtful, comprehensive analysis of the healthy vaccinee phenomenon in Austria, which included a novel approach.1 Unvaccinated were matched to vaccinated on several variables, and the authors compared several outcomes over two weeks after the completion of various doses. Table 3 (article) and Tables S44-S45 (supplementary document) show results for all-cause mortality, non-COVID-19 mortality, and COVID-19 mortality.
Since the healthy vaccinee bias diminishes over time, it would be interesting to extend the analysis of the matched cohorts to 4 weeks and 8 weeks. Numerous studies have estimated effectiveness over one to two months post-vaccination, which sometimes coincided with the duration of a COVID-19 wave.
The authors mention a rudimentary method of correction, derived from the idea of prior event rate ratio adjustment.2-5 The hazard ratio of COVID-19 mortality is divided by the hazard ratio of non-COVID-19 mortality. Although not perfect, it may provide more insight when follow-up is extended, and the number of COVID-19 deaths is larger. Applying the method for 19 COVID-19 deaths (Table 3, complete primary vaccination) is still good enough to remove the bias. After the rudimentary correction, the ratio is no longer below 1, whether hazard ratios or rate ratios are used.
On another note, it seems that rate ratios in Tables S44-S45 were mislabeled as hazard ratios and adjusted hazard ratios.
Sincerely,
Eyal Shahar, MD, MPH
Professor Emeritus
University of Arizona
The Rejection
Two days later, a message with boilerplate text landed in my inbox.
Manuscript Number: YJINF-D-25-00940
Article Title: Letter to the Editor
Corresponding Author: Professor Emeritus Eyal Shahar
Submitted to: Journal of Infection
Dear Professor Emeritus Shahar,
Many thanks for submitting your manuscript to the Journal of Infection. Unfortunately we receive many more papers than we have space to publish and we can therefore process a finite number of submissions. Unfortunately, after consideration by the editors, this paper did not achieve sufficient priority. Please note we do not encourage resubmission of a paper with a reject decision.
I am sorry about this adverse decision and that we cannot provide more specific reasons for rejection, and I hope you will continue to submit your work to the Journal of Infection in the future.
Yours sincerely,
Professor Robert Charles Read
Editor
Journal of Infection
I was mildly surprised. Interestingly, the boilerplate text was written for rejected manuscripts (papers). Don’t they have comparable text for rejected letters? How often are letters rejected by this journal? Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps it is even similar to mine.
Read More – Long Post – Vaccination Censorship
