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Canadian COVID-19 vaccine study seized on by anti-vaxxers — highlighting dangers
of early research in pandemic | CBC News Loaded
Health·SECOND OPINION


CANADIAN COVID-19 VACCINE STUDY SEIZED ON BY ANTI-VAXXERS — HIGHLIGHTING DANGERS
OF EARLY RESEARCH IN PANDEMIC

A Canadian study that vastly underestimated the protection COVID-19 vaccines
provide against the Omicron variant is being revised — but not before it spread
widely on social media by anti-vaxxers, academics and even the creators of the
Russian Sputnik V vaccine.


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STUDY FOUND BOOSTERS ONLY 37% EFFECTIVE AGAINST OMICRON, BUT DATA BEING REVISED

Adam Miller · CBC News · Posted: Jan 15, 2022 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: January
15

A Canadian study is being updated after it vastly underestimated the protection
COVID-19 vaccines offer against Omicron. (Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press)
8554
comments

Subscribe to Second Opinion for a weekly roundup of health and medical science
news.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Canadian study that vastly underestimated the protection COVID-19 vaccines
provide against the Omicron variant is being revised — but not before it spread
widely on social media by anti-vaxxers, academics and even the creators of the
Russian Sputnik V vaccine.



The Ontario preprint study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, suggested that
any three doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were just 37 per cent effective
against Omicron infection, while two doses actually showed negative protection.

The preprint has been shared on Twitter more than 15,000 times in the two weeks
since it's been published, according to Altmetric, a company that tracks where
published research is posted online. That's in the top five per cent of all
research it's ever tracked.

 * Second Opinion
   A Canadian COVID-19 study that turned out to be wrong has spread like
   wildfire among anti-vaxxers

The group behind Sputnik V shared the results to its one million Twitter
followers earlier this month, saying the study showed "negative efficacy" of two
mRNA vaccine doses and "quickly waning efficiency" of a booster. The group did
not respond to questions from CBC News.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of
California-San Francisco, also shared it on Twitter, asking why the U.S Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) would advise a
booster for Omicron at all.


A health-care worker administers a COVID-19 vaccine at a mass vaccination clinic
at the Toronto Zoo on Wednesday. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)


STUDY UPDATING FINDINGS WITH TOTALLY DIFFERENT RESULTS

But the paradoxical findings were later found to have been influenced by
behavioural and methodological issues, such as the timing of the observational
study, the way in which vaccine passports altered individual risk and changes in
access to COVID-19 testing.

The results are currently being updated with additional data that showed
completely different results, said Dr. Jeff Kwong, the study's lead author and
an epidemiologist and senior scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative
Sciences (ICES) in Toronto.

"We're in the process of adding two more weeks of data and it looks like there's
no more negative VE (vaccine effectiveness). Our results are now more in line
with the data from the U.K. where it's lower, for sure, compared to Delta, but
never getting to negative," he told CBC News.

"And then higher VE with the boost. So I think that's good news and we're just
in the process of running those analyses and we hope to have an updated
version, a version two, by sometime next week." 

 * Second Opinion
   Omicron has completely changed the pandemic — it's time to change how we
   respond to it

A recent report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 response team found
that while Omicron largely evades immunity from prior infection and two doses
provided just zero to 20 per cent protection, three doses increased that to
between 55 and 80 per cent. 

That means the updated preprint could end up showing that protection against
Omicron infection is more than twice as high as initially reported. As of
Friday, the preprint study remained unchanged on the medRxiv website where it
was posted. 

CBC cited the study in an analysis story last week, but has since removed
reference to it until the data is updated. 

 * Analysis
   Canada is flying blind with Omicron as COVID-19 testing drops off a cliff

The study was also highlighted by the federal government's COVID-19 Immunity
Task Force earlier this week, before the discrepancies in the data were
discovered.

"We've touched base with Dr. Kwong and indeed he informed us of new data as of
Monday night," a spokesperson said in response to CBC News raising concerns
about the study's accuracy. 

"As the data from this week does change things, we've pulled the preprint from
our magazine that's being sent out today." 


Dr. Danuta Skowronski, with the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, says the rapid
sharing of COVID-19 vaccine studies on social media has completely changed the
research landscape, adding more pressure to get early results right. (CBC)

Dr. Danuta Skowronski, a vaccine effectiveness expert and epidemiology lead at
the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, who developed the vaccine study design used
in the preprint, posted a commentary urging "extreme caution" with the results
last week.

"If you have a negative estimate, you want to start looking at, OK, well, which
subgroup is driving that and why?'" she told CBC News.

"Is it the asymptomatic? Is it the symptomatic? Is it people who were screened
for work? Is it people who had a rapid antigen test? Which group is it that's
driving that paradoxical finding?" 

 * Second Opinion
   Omicron rapidly shifts the need for boosters in Canada

Skowronski said until those questions have been resolved, "all bets are off" on
the interpretation of the results and "the validity of the study has to be
questioned." 

"In the real world, we cannot control the behaviour of people, and so these
studies are susceptible to lack of comparability between the vaccinated and the
unvaccinated," she said, adding that vaccine passports dramatically changed the
risk of exposure in Ontario. 

"There are good reasons to believe that the very slim fraction of people who
remain unvaccinated — that group are quite different now from vaccinated
individuals." 


STUDY SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE WITH ANTI-VAXXERS ONLINE

The study highlights the speed in which early study results that have not
undergone peer review can spread online in the pandemic and the way in which
inaccurate findings can be weaponized to fit an agenda before they can be
corrected. 

Many who shared the study on Twitter used anti-vaccination rhetoric to allege
boosters didn't work against COVID-19, while others posited the vaccines should
not have been approved for emergency use by the FDA in the first place because
they did not meet its initial 50 per cent efficacy threshold.

"This will definitely be used by bad actors to consolidate support for their
views about the lack of COVID-19 vaccination effectiveness," said Ahmed Al-Rawi,
an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University's School of Communication who
specializes in disinformation.

"I would immediately take it down and make some public statements about the
inaccurate findings of the study, because this has been shared widely on social
media and it will only confuse people more." 

WATCH | Ontario ICU overwhelmed by mostly unvaccinated patients:


THE MOSTLY UNVACCINATED PATIENTS OVERWHELMING AN ONTARIO ICU

2 days ago
Duration 3:39
Mostly unvaccinated patients are overwhelming the ICU at a Sarnia, Ont.,
hospital and some will head home with a new perspective on COVID-19, the vaccine
and life. 3:39

The study also notably did not look at the protection vaccines offered from
severe COVID-19, which has been shown to be much higher than against Omicron
infection alone — something Kwong says he and his colleagues will be adding in a
future version.

While COVID-19 vaccines don't provide total protection from infection, they do
work well at preventing serious disease. New data from the Public Health Agency
of Canada found Canadians with two doses were 19 times less likely to be
hospitalized than those unvaccinated.

"Several studies have shown modest protection from two doses against Omicron
infection, but better protection against severe outcomes such as
hospitalization," said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan
School of Public Health in Boston.

"This benefit is over and above any possible benefit of preventing infection or
transmission."

 * Omicron could threaten COVID-19 immunity — but we're not going back to
   'square one'

Lipsitch said Skowronski's criticisms of the study are valid. He has cautioned
against comparing positive cases among those with symptoms with those not tested
for different reasons, adding he very much agrees this approach can be a source
of "substantial bias."

"When investigators try to share early results in the interests of public
health, as these folks did, there's often a lot of uncertainty in those
estimates," said Dr. David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of
Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

"But it's very hard to reel in once people start using early versions of your
work in support of misinformation."

 * Analysis
   Tracking omicron: Canadian scientists race to understand new variant

Skowronski said the rapid sharing of COVID-19 vaccine studies on social media
has completely changed the research landscape, adding more pressure to get early
results right.

"You need to ask yourself, why do we need to post it now? Why can it not wait
the one or two weeks? How will this impact public and policy decision-making?"
Skowronski said.

"And if you can't answer that, then we really should be asking ourselves: Why
are we rushing to preprint?"

WATCH | Canadians urged by health experts to take first available vaccine:


HEALTH EXPERTS URGE CANADIANS TO TAKE WHICHEVER VACCINE IS AVAILABLE

8 days ago
Duration 2:13
Health experts across the country are urging Canadians to stop shopping around
for their preferred brand and take whichever COVID-19 vaccine is available. 2:13

Skowronski released a study in 2010 showing paradoxical negative vaccine
effectiveness during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic that found those who had a flu shot
were more likely to get infected with the influenza strain than people who
hadn't, which was later proven right.

But she first assumed the findings were methodologically inaccurate, reached out
to outside experts around the world, conducted multiple different studies and
worked with an international panel of experts.

"I learned the lesson the hard way back in 2009 in dealing with paradoxical
findings and the level of rigour required," she said. "You don't approach this
in a casual way — it does require lots of thinking, lots of worry — before you
can arrive at this."

 * Analysis
   Omicron's spread may boost collective immunity, but at what cost?

Dr. Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks errors
in science journals, said because the study turned out to be "flawed," the
researchers should move fast to update their findings.

"They're doing the right thing. The question is how quickly will they do it?" he
said. "I mean, they're talking about next week … but that is a bit of an
eternity in this day and age."


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Miller

Senior Writer

Adam Miller is a senior health writer with CBC News. He's covered health,
politics and breaking news extensively in Canada for over a decade, in addition
to several years reporting on news and current affairs throughout Asia.

 * @adamsmiller

CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices|About CBC News
Report Typo or Error|Corrections and Clarifications


RELATED STORIES

 * Second Opinion
   A Canadian COVID-19 study that turned out to be wrong has spread like
   wildfire among anti-vaxxers
 * Second Opinion
   Omicron has completely changed the pandemic — it's time to change how we
   respond to it
 * Analysis
   Canada is flying blind with Omicron as COVID-19 testing drops off a cliff

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