FAKE NEWS: WND Hypes False Claims About Retracted COVID Vaccine Study

The COVID vaccine misinformation just never stops at WorldNetDaily. Bob Unruh contributed in a July 21 article:

A new study, conducted by respected medical researchers and published in The Lancet, a renowned medical journal, indicated that the COVID shots themselves actually killed people – and the study now has been killed.

That’s according to a report from Liberty Counsel, which has been one of the key fighters in court against the Biden administration’s various COVID shot mandates during the pandemic.

The report said the “bombshell” study was done by Dr. Peter McCullough and others and was published in The Lancet.

But it “was quickly censored within 24 hours after its publication because it showed clear evidence that the COVID-19 shots were responsible for many deaths.”

Of the 325 autopsies reviewed, “the study revealed the COVID shots directly caused or significantly contributed to up to 74% of those deaths.”

But as an actual fact-checker at AFP pointed out, the study was never published in The Lancet; it appeared on a preprint server where studies typically appear before peer review, and it was never accepted for publication by The Lancet.

Unruh went on to hype the alleged credentials of the study authors:

The report said McCullough, a renowned internist, epidemiologist and “one of the most published cardiologists in American with more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications,” did the study with eight other researchers.

They included Yale researcher Dr. Harvey Risch, pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson and Dr. Paul Alexander, formerly of the Department of Health and Human Services.

McCullough, of course, is a prolific COVID misinformer whom WND has repeatedly touted. Risch, Hodkinson and Alexander are COVID misinformers as well.Their study was removed from the preprint server because it was highly flawed, as AFP documented:

Zhou Xing, an immunology professor at McMaster University, found the methodology to be flawed as it did not seem to factor in medical conditions and age as possible reasons that death could have occurred after vaccination.

“It seems an astoundingly ridiculous analysis and conclusion and I believe one does not have to be a scientific or medical expert to find the major flaws,” Xing said in a July 12 email.

Xing noted that because a large majority of people have received Covid-19 shots, mortality rates will inevitably be higher for vaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.

AFP also showed how the paper’s claims of having been “independently reviewed” is bogus:

Brian Ward, a professor of experimental medicine who studies the adverse effects of vaccines at McGill University, said he questioned the study’s claims of independent researchers, given the physicians’ histories of spreading Covid-19 misinformation could lead them to be invested in reaching a conclusion that supports their previous statements.

“The way they use the word ‘independently’ here simply means that each of the biased individuals sat in a separate room to reach a personal conclusion before sharing their (largely pre-determined) classifications with each other,” Ward said in an email on July 12, 2023.

Ward said he believed it was unlikely the paper would ever be published in a medical journal.

AFP also noted a professor who lamented that the claims in this “zombie paper” will become part of the discourse despite its having been discredited and retracted.But the truth does not matter to WND; instead, Unruh uncritically quoted McCullough making the blatantly untrue claim that “They are trying to kill [the study] so the world doesn’t see the data.”