For those that actually want to read the article rather than watch Bigtree's antivax propaganda it can be found published in a pay to publish open access journal at the address below. I note the author of the article is also an editor of the journal and his background as stated in his journal profile is "Professor of forest genetics, forest ecosystem analysis, forestry, biometrics, forest growth, and biodiversity..."
https://peerj.com/articles/10112/
The article is introduced with the following disclaimer:
October 14, 2020:Publisher Note: Given the public interest in articles which report on vaccination, the publisher reminds readers that correlation (which this article reports upon for a specific age group) does not necessarily equal causation. As such, this article should not be taken to suggest that receiving the influenza vaccination results in an increased risk of death for an individual with COVID-19 as there may be many confounding factors at play (including, for example, socioeconomic factors). The publisher also wants to draw the attention of readers to the peer-review history of this article.
And the analysis underlying this article is simply a correlation exercise between Covid deaths and a number of factors including, at the country level, flu vaccination rate for >65 year olds but we don't know the vaccination status of those who died. This of course makes it impossible to actually determine any relationship with any degree of certainty.
To illustrate just one issue with using country level data, anti-vaxxers have attempted to correlate Italy's reasonable country level vaccination rate for elderly with the high Covid death rate ignoring that the highest death rate was in Lombardy where vaccine hesitancy is prevalent and vaccination rates are the lowest in the country. So looking only at Italy's country level data masks critical detail. See post 44018018
And of course each country's data varies in quality so likely adds further uncertainty when undertaking comparision.
The authors conclusion with respect to his high level analytical exercise:Conclusions
Given the positive relationship between IVR and the number of deaths per million found in this study, further exploration would be valuable to explain these findings and to make conclusions. Additional work on this line of research may also yield results to improve prevention of COVID-19 deaths.
Which basically says this could be something interesting to investigate in greater depth to see if it's real or not. No doubt Bigtree claims these results are definitive.
