Health and Medicine
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It takes a lot to get a scientific paper retracted. Journals have paragraphs of protocols they have to follow. It generally involves a lot of conversation with the papers’ authors and sometimes third parties who have flagged a concern. A notice explaining the reasons for retraction must be drafted and posted as promptly as the investigation allows.
The idea, as outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics, is to correct the scientific record. Anyone accessing the paper in the future will still be able to read it, but they’ll also be shown a metaphorical waving red flag that this paper contained fatal flaws, making the conclusions unreliable.
It’s not a perfect system. The blog site Retraction Watch keeps a running list of retracted papers that have continued to get dozens of citations after the retraction was issued – some of those citations may be critiquing the original paper, but it’s hard to say how many without analyzing every single one.
Some retractions happen quietly, under the radar of all but the most interested experts in the field. Others make more of a splash (you may remember a Lancet paper by a certain Andrew Wakefield et al).
COVID mortality claims
The journal BMJ Public Health recently retracted a paper that had received some very prominent citations, as well as being mentioned during a recent US Senate subcommittee hearing.
The study, originally published in March 2024, documented additional deaths in over 40 countries between January 2020 and December 2022, covering the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the months after vaccines were introduced and lockdowns lifted.
“Excess mortality has remained high in the Western World for three consecutive years,” the paper’s authors claimed, citing a figure of over 1.2 million in 2021 and over 800,000 in 2022 despite COVID vaccine rollouts.
The paper goes on to make statements such as “COVID-19 containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines […] may have detrimental effects that cause inferior outcomes as well,” and makes reference to “suspected adverse effects” of the vaccines and vaccination as a “potential contributor to excess mortality.”
Citing this study, plenty of outlets and individuals went on to proclaim a possible causal link between COVID vaccines and excess deaths. Retraction Watch flags example articles from UK newspaper The Telegraph, as well as the New York Post, though the latter was later corrected.
As recently as June 3 of this year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations heard witness testimony that cited the study.
The hearing, entitled “Plausible mechanisms of COVID-19 injections causing cancer and attacks on scientific publications and research,” aimed – according to Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) – to “help explain why such a large percentage of the public remains unaware of the serious adverse events caused by the COVID mRNA injections.”
Various witness testimonies repeated misleading claims about mRNA vaccines that we’ve heard before, such as the idea that they can change the cellular genome. There's no evidence that mRNA vaccines cause genetic mutations of any kind in humans, as was stated during the proceedings by Dr Julie Gralow, the Chief Medical Officer of the Association for Clinical Oncology.
Dr Saskia Mostert, who was the corresponding author of the now retracted BMJ Public Health paper, also put forward her testimony and referred to the 2024 paper heavily throughout her statement.
Mostert argued that her team “did not claim certainty regarding the causes of excess mortality.” But in asking questions about the potential role of vaccines and other mitigations, she claimed her research was met with “massive outrage” and “blind fury.”
She went on to state that governments and the media were engaging in “psychological manipulation,” “fear propaganda,” “censorship,” and “suppression” of scientists going against the “official COVID narrative.”
Asking the wrong questions
The argument from scientists who raised the alarm about this study when it was published, and the reason for the retraction now, is that its results cannot support the conclusion that COVID vaccines had any kind of role to play in the excess death stats.
The case is laid out rather neatly on mathematician Christina Pagel's blog in a guest post from actuary Stuart McDonald. His analysis of the data the study was based on found there was a stronger correlation with the mortality data in the paper and COVID itself – in other words, it would be more reasonable to say these people were dying as a direct result of the virus and not other factors.
"The relationship between COVID deaths and excess deaths in the countries shown is so strong that we really ought to be able to stop there," McDonald wrote. He also drew on previously published data to point out that the countries with the highest excess deaths during this period of the pandemic also tended to have lower vaccine uptake.
The converse was also true – countries with lower excess deaths had higher vaccine coverage overall, adding to the body of evidence that COVID vaccines saved lives. "The association is in the opposite direction to what's insinuated in the article," concluded McDonald.
There were side effects from the vaccines, some of which were serious. This is true of any medical intervention or drug. But scientific research has concluded, time and again, that the number of people harmed by the vaccines is a tiny fraction of the number who have benefited from them, or the number of people who have been harmed by the virus.
"Concerns about quality, originality and messaging"
As the lengthy retraction notice now explains, “The journal was alerted to concerns about quality, originality and messaging in this research paper.”
Following the outcry, the journal quickly published an Expression of Concern – that can be a precursor to a retraction and is basically the journal editor flagging to the scientific community that something’s up with the paper and that an investigation is happening.
Three of the authors were based at the Princess Máxima Centre for Pediatric Oncology in the Netherlands, which initiated its own investigation. The journal also corresponded with Mostert in October 2025.
The journal ultimately concluded the paper should be retracted for “misinformation in the discussion regarding the possible causes of excess mortality, and because the limited nature of the original work by the authors was not sufficiently described.”
The data for the study had been taken from the Our World in Data project and used statistical modeling published by other researchers – one of whom spoke to Retraction Watch and alleged that the authors may have plagiarized his work.
The BMJ deemed the authors had done enough data analysis of their own so that "no plagiarism or malice had occurred." However, it said the conclusions relating to vaccines and COVID containment measures were imbalanced, despite Mostert suggesting some further revisions to the text.
Retraction notices will generally state whether or not the authors all agree with the decision. If the journal’s investigation finds strong enough reason to do so, papers can be retracted without the authors’ consent.
In this case, two of the authors agreed with the retraction, although not with the claims of misinformation. Mostert wrote on behalf of herself and co-author Marcel Hoogland that she disputes both the retraction and the reasons for it.
The full retraction notice is published in BMJ Public Health.
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