BMJ Group retracts paper on COVID-19 vaccines and mortality featured in Senate hearing

[Gary C]

Critics of the paper said it contained misquotes and omissions on vaccines and was "full of inappropriate insinuation." Ariel Karlinsky, an economist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and cocreator of the World Mortality Dataset, contacted the journal starting in June 2024, requesting a retraction multiple times. Karlinsky felt the analysis misused his data and "copied whole blocks of text and mathematical notation" from his article.

Full article on Retraction Watch - https://retractionwatch.com/2026/08...ction-covid-19-vaccines-death-senate-hearing/

 

[FatPhil]

Not doubting you at all, but I'm interested in the "featured in Senate hearing" part. I presume this is related to the very recent diktat on childhood vaccine recommendations, but who presented the paper as evidence for what?

Reading the RW article, it's clear that that paper had huge warning flags all over it since July 2024 - it barely lasted a month untainted - so it's almost inconceivable that anyone who knew anything about the subject would still be using it to support any stance two years later. (I said "almost", it only takes a couple of very small, easily supportable, assumptions to have it make perfect sense.)

 

[Ann K]

From the retraction notice (my bold):

The article has been cited 21 times, according to Clarivate's Web of Science. Altmetrics for the article put it in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by the site. It joins our list of nearly 700 retracted COVID-19 papers.

The retraction is hardly the first of a paper linking COVID-19 vaccines to excess deaths. For example, earlier this year, a lawsuit failed to block the retraction of a paper linking heart-related deaths to the COVID-19 vaccine. In 2024, Cureus retracted a paper on the "extensive" harms of the vaccine.

Not doubting you at all, but I'm interested in the "featured in Senate hearing" part. I presume this is related to the very recent diktat on childhood vaccine recommendations, but who presented the paper as evidence for what?

I'm not sure, but there is also a vicious (and purely political) attack on Dr. Fauci occurring now, so the paper may have been introduced as part of that witch-hunt. Even FOX news, as virulently right-wing as it is, had to issue a retraction for statements made in support of one congresswoman:

"We want to clarify a segment that aired yesterday with Congresswoman Lisa McClain, where the congresswoman referenced data on miscarriages from an April 2021 study from The New England Journal of Medicine. Now, the Journal later corrected how the miscarriage data was calculated and stated, 'These percentages are well within the range expected as an outcome for this age group of persons whose other underlying medical conditions are unknown.'"

Fox News host Elizabeth MacDonald, in an on-air correction.

The statements were outrageously silly, stating a miscarriage rate so egregiously high that it surely could not have escaped notice until now. But she computed that from the number of successful pregnancies cited, without noticing that most of the women in the study were still pregnant. The miscarriage rate in the study then came down to the approximate rate for unvaccinated women. The mistake might not have been hers originally, of course, but it is so far off the mark that it illustrates perfectly the rabid partisanship of the attack.

Edit to add: Senator Ted Cruz also repeated the same thing, but retracted it after a strong backlash.

 

[John J.]

I'm interested in the "featured in Senate hearing" part. I presume this is related to the very recent diktat on childhood vaccine recommendations, but who presented the paper as evidence for what?

Probably corresponding author Saskia Mostert, 03 June 2026.

Lead author Mostert resigned in 2024 after the Princess Máxima Center announced it would be investigating the paper, she said at a hearing on June 3 before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee subcommittee on investigations on "Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research."

Retraction Watch website as per OP (https://retractionwatch.com/2026/08...ction-covid-19-vaccines-death-senate-hearing/).

The Retraction Watch article links to a Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs webpage,
"Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research", https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcom...ancer-and-attacks-on-scientific-publications/

The chair was Ron Johnson, a Republican Senator for Wisconsin. Saskia Mostert's testimony is available as a PDF from that webpage, attached below. She doesn't really discuss the methodology or validity of her research, most of her evidence is essentially a diatribe against anyone questioning the retracted paper and other papers with dramatic conclusions which might have implications for public health but which might not be accurate.

Mostert, in her evidence, described the response to the 2024 paper as "blind fury", yet Retraction Watch says

In 2024, the Princess Máxima Center investigated the involvement of two authors, Minke Huibers and Gertjan Kaspers, but did not look at Mostert's work on the study because she was "not able to cooperate with the investigation," the report reads.

The Princess Máxima Center in the Netherlands is where 3 of the 4 authors (including Mostert) worked.

Mostert appears to have avoided investigation, an opportunity to address criticism or accept responsibility for this potentially harmful "research", and any subsequent sanction the "blind fury" of her employing institution by... ...not cooperating with them.

Ariel Karlinsky, who first raised concerns about the paper (he was co-creator of the World Mortality Dataset which the research used)

...felt the analysis misused his data and "copied whole blocks of text and mathematical notation"

(Retraction Watch).
He alleges plagiarism, but the Princess Máxima Center did not find that plagiarism occurred (so perhaps its blind fury wasn't boundless). However, Retraction Watch quotes a possible example given by Karlinsky,

There was "no other way to explain how 'compromise between flexibility and simplicity'" in his paper "was tortured to 'a trade-off between suppleness and chasteness,'" he said. Tortured phrases can indicate plagiarism.

The use of synonyms can be used to mask the direct quoting of a phrase; where the intended synonyms, in the context in which they are used, don't quite work (e.g. sound awkward or too different in normal usage to the word they are replacing to native speakers of the language) it can result in tortured phrasing. A bit like some computer translations or AI summaries/ re-phrasings. Not, of course, that there is any evidence that the 2024 authors used AI to rephrase anything from other people's research.