On Covid Vaccine Study, Who Edits the Editor?
May 5, 2023 5:25 pm ET Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, Aug. 3, 2022. Photo: Paul Hennessy/Zuma Press Allysia Finley seeks an explanation for what’s wrong with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s edits of a Florida study that examined the cardiac health risks of mRNA Covid vaccines (“Joseph Ladapo Bucks the Covid Vaccine Orthodoxy,” Life Science, May 1). As a retired physician-scientist who has served on many editorial boards of medical journals and has performed peer review for many hundreds of scientific articles, I find Dr. Ladapo’s deletion of the sensitivity analysis in the report to be most disturbing. Sensitivity analyses of clinical studies provide insight into the possible causes or explanations of the findings in a primary data analysis, and therefore may provide assurance, or expose the lack thereof, of the strength or robustness of the
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, Aug. 3, 2022.
Photo: Paul Hennessy/Zuma Press
Allysia Finley seeks an explanation for what’s wrong with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s edits of a Florida study that examined the cardiac health risks of mRNA Covid vaccines (“Joseph Ladapo Bucks the Covid Vaccine Orthodoxy,” Life Science, May 1). As a retired physician-scientist who has served on many editorial boards of medical journals and has performed peer review for many hundreds of scientific articles, I find Dr. Ladapo’s deletion of the sensitivity analysis in the report to be most disturbing.
Sensitivity analyses of clinical studies provide insight into the possible causes or explanations of the findings in a primary data analysis, and therefore may provide assurance, or expose the lack thereof, of the strength or robustness of the primary analysis. Most high-quality clinical studies present sensitivity analyses to let the reader interpret the results in the most complete and objective way.
Absent inclusion of the sensitivity analyses performed by Dr. Ladapo’s staff, the reader may be left with the presumption that the twofold risk of cardiac events observed in the primary analysis is the end of the story. But a thoughtful reader might come to a very different conclusion after analyzing the sensitivity results. Dr. Ladapo’s actions are thus at odds with an objective, unbiased and scientific report of the study’s results, and are below the level of quality we should expect from physicians and scientists reporting studies.
Em. Prof. Lewis J. Rubin, M.D.
University of California, San Diego School of Medicine
What's Your Reaction?
