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A paper published in BMJ Public Health earlier this month has been stirring controversy over what many experts have characterized as poor methods and forced conclusions.

The paper, entitled "Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: 'Our World in Data' estimates of January 2020 to December 2022," was , and The BMJ issued promoting it the next day.

Several news outlets, , reported on the study's conclusion that COVID vaccines were linked to excess deaths. The BMJ and was placed on the paper on June 14, noting that the paper's "messaging gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding of the work amid claims that it implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality" when the researchers "looked only at trends in excess mortality over time, not its causes."

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, PhD, an epidemiologist from the University of Wollongong in Australia, disagreed. "I think that [The BMJ] are misrepresenting the paper, which does explicitly say vaccines caused excess deaths," he told MedPage Today. "I don't think it's fair to only blame the reporters in this case."

Meyerowitz-Katz also noted that The BMJ responded much faster than usual to public critiques of the paper, and that academic journals often take months to post an expression of concern and years for a retraction. He said that COVID has shortened that timeline because people look at new research sooner and critiques go viral online, which then causes more people to read the research and inspires some to email publishers.

Indeed, a BMJ spokesperson told MedPage Today that "the quality and messaging issues of the research came to light through clinicians contacting BMJ Public Health and BMJ's official complaints channel and via external party public statements."

For instance, Stuart Mcdonald, an actuary, detailed issues with the paper days after it was published in a well-circulated . Meyerowitz-Katz also addressed the issue .

"There are so many errors in this short paper that it's hard to know where to start," Meyerowitz-Katz wrote.

The first obvious issue, he told MedPage Today, is "that the paper itself is entirely based on previous work." Researchers copied the methods from published in eLife, by Ariel Karlinsky, a PhD student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and Dmitry Kobak, PhD, a research scientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, Meyerowitz-Katz said. That paper has been cited by organizations like the United Nations and CDC, he added.

"They re-analyzed it badly, and then they published it as novel work, which is extremely problematic," Meyerowitz-Katz noted.

Karlinsky to "retract the paper, open an inquiry, share results, make sure this doesn't happen again, and publicly apologize" -- and other experts have .

However, Meyerowitz-Katz pointed out that bad research will occasionally make it through peer review and doesn't think a huge investigation is necessary.

Becky Smullin Dawson, PhD, MPH, of Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, told MedPage Today that the BMJ Public Health article "was clearly not assessed well" and is "a failure of the peer-review process." She noted that while the introduction details the dangers of COVID vaccines, the methods and results don't have data to back those claims up.

"The connection to vaccines is completely speculative -- but one needs to read the full article to see that they made that jump. The data did not connect those dots. Heck -- the data do not even exist," Dawson said.

Three of the study's authors are affiliated with the Princess Máxima Center, a pediatric oncology institution in the Netherlands, which "distancing itself" from the publication, and noting that it is conducting its own investigation.

Meyerowitz-Katz noted that this was an unusual move, since institutions almost always stand by their researchers.

The study authors did not reply to MedPage Today's request for comment.

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