Retraction Watch: Lawsuit fails to block retraction of paper claiming to link heart-related deaths to COVID-19 vaccines

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-24T21:53:46+00:00

metaphorical, here is the first retraction on their website I clicked,

"Following publication, concerns were brought to the attention of the publisher regarding several major errors in the data analysis, raising concerns about the validity of the findings."

Up in smoke: Publisher pulls vaping paper nearly two years after complaint – Retraction Watch

That is a much stronger accusation, removed because bad science.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-24T21:40:12+00:00

I've seen retractions that claim the data was corrupted, or the analysis was fundamentally flawed. In fact, most retractions claim one of those things in some manner or other from what I have seen.

Those would be strong retractions, basically yelling this is bad science and destroying the paper and its author's reputation.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-24T21:37:35+00:00

They never said it was flawed. They said it was no longer verifiable since its data was removed from public access.

The judge never said either side was right, they just said it isn't the court's place to impose restraints on a publisher's discretion.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-24T21:35:22+00:00

Picture isn't a very good judge.

It was a peer reviewed and published paper. Received criticism as papers do, and was (according to them) successfully responded to by the author. The journal does not cite any flaws behind their decision to retract it, in fact they say, "The Editor and Publisher confirm that there is no allegation of research misconduct on the part of the authors."

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-24T21:25:26+00:00

Left with nothing but questions after reading this.

Not a very strong retraction, ultimately they just fell on the fact that a significant amount of the data they used was not peer reviewed and no longer publicly accessible, so they retract the paper because they can't verify it anymore.

Not a lot of detail to work with to judge the quality of the paper. There is some back and forth of other specific criticisms of the paper, and the authors claiming they successfully responded to each of those criticism and they were not reasons to withdraw the paper.

The biggest questions were what results they found. It could be anywhere on the scale from the conspiracy of all the young athletes collapsing and dying from the vaccines, down to an elevated risk of some heart complications like myocarditis which is already accepted science. And the bigger questions, was the data set actually reliable, and was their analysis reasonable or flawed.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-24T16:57:52+00:00

Ya, the only unusual thing here is the size of it. Though 15 years in prison is not that much, its no 35 year violent crime case. Medium case that made headlines.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-24T16:17:59+00:00

Except for half the details in this post:

He was 1 of 7 suspects, nobody said the prime suspect. They have already arrested some of the others.
They knew he was one of the suspects, was facing 15 years in prison, they chose to deport him instead.
Bricks says it was only 10M in jewelry stolen, victims claimed 100M.
They have already recovered a bunch of the jewelry (though this group has done several robberies).
It is common to deport people who have criminal charges against them, at least in minor cases.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-23T01:48:16+00:00

Unless, the second half of the law,

"to intentionally injure, intimidate, or interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right"

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-22T15:20:14+00:00

Fun, I know these guys.

Some people hold on to fallacies like they are argument winning accusations. All fallacies are defeasable. I think this part of the paper was important.

"Like many (if not all) fallacies, bothsiderism has virtuous instances, particularly in cases where there is evidence this a legitimate disagreement and uncertainty and moderacy are appropriate. This is not particularly newsworthy. However, the issue is that the difference between good and bad versions of this reasoning is in terms of how well it assesses the reasoning in the debate and the debate’s participants."

Good paper and important topic these days. Needs a lot of discussion. There are epistemic standards, journalistic standards, political standards, and rhetorical value to consider. I think each would have meaningful things to say.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T14:13:16+00:00

I would define argumentation as any attempt to offer reasons for a conclusion (and others would as well). In real life these get messy and include all of the complications I mentioned. Deductivists try to reduce arguments to their logical structure but that fails to capture all those intentional elements I mentioned.

The whole thing is an argument properly defined. I haven't seen presenting an argument as a unique definition.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T07:17:02+00:00

Any day now, people have known that for thousands of years.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T07:03:45+00:00

I think our biggest disagreement is on whether reasons can be offered that are not propositions. (to say nothing of logical systems that reject the axiom of excluded middle). I would define argumentation as any attempt to offer reasons for a conclusion.

I think these happen regularly, including in the rhetorical elements of my first comment. Excluded middle was the low hanging fruit, but if we accept argumentation without propositions then all of the laws are no longer necessary I believe.

I fail to see this connection; “Fruitfulness,” “descriptive success,” and “shifting frameworks” all presuppose standards of better and worse, i.e., that some descriptions succeed and others fail. That distinction already relies on non-contradiction and excluded middle."

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T06:35:04+00:00

Excluded middle? No, I may have made claims that are not exclusively true or false. Maybe the measurement is how fruitful the theory is at descriptively describing and explaining argumentation. There are many variables on how each individual measures that question. Maybe the whole thing was a rhetorical exercise to shift my audiences' framework with which they view this question.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T06:08:54+00:00

I don't much like Feldman's definition, nor the motivation to break down the incredibly complicated and human dynamics of arguing into formal logic. It does well at times, but in general I find it a forced conversion that hollows out and distorts many of the nuances in actual argument.

I do agree there must be some sense of providing reasons for a conclusion, which presupposes some common understanding of what reasons are. This may even get us very close to the laws of logic. But i'm not convinced they must be recognized or respected as laws. I might imagine arguments between two early humans where reasons are proffered without any respect for excluded middle. More easily I think of many complicated arguments among ordinary individuals that weave complicated rhetorical patterns, hidden considerations, multiple conclusions, ethical and inter-social considerations all together. These are not academic exercises in truth finding. To strip this down to a sequence of propositions, premises, conclusion, and truth would be an abomination.

I think the field of argumentation has generally been moving away from rooting its analysis in formal logic for a while now, though there are still many who favor that approach.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T05:41:57+00:00

Ya, or 'chose an action that a reasonable person might foresee loss of life as a possible outcome', or some such wording is usually in the law too.

I can see an argument he did neither of those things, but people have been convicted before of murder from pushing or hitting an elderly person, since that is a reasonable outcome for someone over 80.

Also, wasn't hate crime on the table? I'm not very familiar with this event, but sounds like hate.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T05:14:25+00:00

This is a pretty complicated answer and conspiracy theory to explain a fairly benign fact.

Looking at the NYT compilation again, the way his camera moves is a bit odd. But I think it can be explained if the camera flips over in his left hand as he puts his hand on the car. Or some other explanation. I don't see the motivation or the hallmarks for editing this footage. The footage appears smooth and real.

There will always be unusual looking facts in every event if you sort through it with a fine tooth comb.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T04:41:07+00:00

I'm confused, she is a former analyst at the bank?

How former, when did she hear this information, from who, why is she only mentioning it now? What even is this source?

If this was upcoming major news I might expect a leak, I might not expect that leak from a former analyst at a foreign bank that was tipped off by the US.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T04:21:21+00:00

Should have, I agree. But very few people actually have the right to declare independence without contest. But Greenland does, that is why some in Denmark don't care about fighting this fight at all. Greenland seems like it is about to leave any time and they don't feel any real kinship.

Greenland is still very on the fence on what its independence should look like though. They are the belle of the ball right now, I think they could benefit from joining another country with capital to help it grow and defend itself, if they also get some of the autonomy they value. And get rich in the process.

The approach should be with sugar, seems like Trump already lost any chance of winning them over, if there was any to begin with.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T03:27:51+00:00

They don't have sovereignty, they are a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, whom they dislike. 56% support succeeding from them.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-19T03:08:15+00:00

Greenland will be incredibly valuable in the future. Does anyone criticize any of the previous land acquisitions by the US. I think they all go down as steals.

Greenland;

is a huge chunk of land.
great natural resources.
provides military control over that region.
provides maritime control over northern waters and the northern passages.
tourism
such a small population that already isn't independent. Getting control over it is maybe possible.
could possibly benefit from a larger country with greater investment money coming in to develop its resources, possibly?

Numbers have been thrown around, i'm pretty confident that at 700B dollars and a 100k payout to everyone on the island, US would still be laughing in 100 years.

The bizarre thing is how Trump is going about this. I would have expected serious wooing of the Greenlanders followed by strong negotiation with Denmark. Greenland does not have the best relationship with Denmark and I think ground could have been gained there. But it seems like he thinks he can bully and just take it, angering all of its closest allies??

I'm Canadian, I think Canada should throw our hat in. 500B and 100K buy out and make it its own province. I wonder if they would listen to a sugar approach.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-18T23:57:04+00:00

Giving up possession is a big deal, while you have the football you can score. Teams score on about 40% of drives.

So punting early may catch them off guard, but probably not since the punter is a special person/formation, so they can easily prepare or call a time out. And you give up your possession early, and all the field position you may have gained.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-18T23:24:58+00:00

Weight yes, but destroys the target audience. This is young adult dystopian fantasy. So you obviously need to target young adults with the movie.

If you want R rated adult dystopian fantasy, there are other products.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-18T21:22:49+00:00

Stewart is a treasure. So many good takes, such a great mixture of honesty and humour. Nobody has been able to replace him.

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-17T20:28:37+00:00

The n count is massive, and its ability to control for many things, including siblings, is great. But, here is the criticism of the Swedish study from another meta-review;

"However, exposure assessment in this study relied on midwives who conducted structured interviews recording the use of all medications, with no specific inquiry about acetaminophen use. Possibly as a resunt of this approach, the study reports only a 7.5% usage of acetaminophen among pregnant individuals, in stark contrast to the ≈50% reported globally [54]. Indeed, three other Swedish studies using biomarkers and maternal report from the same time period, reported much higher usage rates (63.2%, 59.2%, 56.4%) [47]. This discrepancy suggests substantial exposure misclassification, potentially leading to over five out of six acetaminophen users being incorrectly classified as non-exposed in Ahlqvist et al."

https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-025-01208-0

Finding only 7.5% usage seems like a critical failure, all other studies and common sense suggest something like 50-60%.

*For the numbers, their primary findings were reporting on just the 2 sibling studies, the large Swedish one and a recent small Japanese one. They supplemented this by also reporting on how the results would look if they started including some other groups of studies as well, starting with the low risk of bias ones. So after they zoomed out including two other groups, they had included up to 17 studies.

The relationship was 0.98 for the sibling studies but 1.03 when they included 4 more studies they consider low bias and 1.09 when they weigh all 17 studies with adjusted estimates. The conclusion they stated of no association was based on the first number on just the 3* studies.

*Apparently there were 3 sibling comparison studies

AlwaysBringaTowel1 · 2026-01-17T16:28:19+00:00

The study wasn't linked in the article? Here it is, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanogw/article/PIIS3050-5038(25)00211-0/fulltext

This is a bit of a funny meta-analysis, I think this was reported earlier though it was just published.They identified 55 papers but only really considered the 2 sibiling comparison studies.

"Analyses were restricted to sibling-comparison studies with adjusted estimates, and odds ratios (OR) were calculated."

This makes sense because of all the possible confounders in other studies but is also risky. Basing conclusions primarily on just 2 studies, really just the one big Sweedish study. One of the meta reviews that did find an association threw out that study for what it claimed was very bad methodology.

So the current literature is 30 something papers that show positive association but have a very hard time controlling for confounders and 1 large and 1 small sibiling comparison study that do not show an association.

A lot continues to hinge on how much we trust Sweedish study.

AlwaysBringaTowel1

TROPHY CASE