In July 2023, a claim circulated that the authoritative medical journal The Lancet allegedly published an article in which it was said that it was the coronavirus vaccine that caused the death of the majority of vaccinated people. We decided to check if this is actually true.

In the media, social networks and blogs it was said that in a publication published in The Lancet article supposedly it says, what's up results autopsies of 325 people who died from COVID-19, the cause of death of 73.9% of them was found to be vaccination.

Many Telegram channels wrote about this: “Live broadcast"(783,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Mriya"(255,000), "Putin on Telegram"(215,000), "Sheikh Tamir" (151,000), "Federation" (93,000), "From the scene"(87,000), "Truth of Russia"(62,000), etc. Post on this topic published Russian actress and vaccine skeptic Ksenia Alferova, as well as social network users. Spread this information and on English language.

The publication in question is a preprint, a text with preliminary data and conclusions that anyone can send to The Lancet editors. When posted on the journal’s website, such materials are preceded special disclaimer: “Publishing preprints from The Lancet is part of the SSRN First Look program, through which journals identify content of interest before publication. <…> The preprints available here are not publications of The Lancet and are not necessarily under review by The Lancet. These preprints represent early-stage research papers that have not been peer-reviewed. The findings should not be used to make clinical or public health decisions and should not be presented to a general audience without indicating that they are preliminary and have not been peer-reviewed.”

Unlike a full-fledged article, which, before being published in an issue of The Lancet or any other reputable scientific journal must pass one or even several rounds of review by subject matter experts and corrected in accordance with the recommendations of reviewers and editors, preprints are a kind of drafts of future publications. Specialized publications can post them on their websites so that a wide range of researchers can point out errors to the author, suggest additions and make other recommendations. However, this does not mean that the publication of a preprint, for example, on The Lancet website, confirms the correctness of the conclusions reached by its authors - they were not double-checked by either the editorial staff or independent reviewers. Preprints are not a new phenomenon in many fields of science, but they are a recent phenomenon in medical and biological journals. For example, the largest such resource for medical specialists, medRxiv, began accepting such work only in 2019.

Although a preprint should not be taken as a full-fledged scientific publication, many journalists and other non-academic people often do not notice the difference between these two types of texts. Both Verified and our colleagues have already debunked false reports based on various preprints. For example, in August 2021, journalists and bloggers incorrectly interpreted a preprint with a dubious calculation method and wrote that the lethality of the Iota coronavirus variant amounts to 82%. A year earlier, the media and social network users distorted the contents of the preprint about persistent immunity to coronavirus, which is supposedly formed in only 17% of those who have recovered from the disease, and concluded that the remaining 83% are doomed to death.

At the time of writing, the preprint text on the link between vaccination and death from COVID-19 is not available on The Lancet website. The Abstract section states, in part: “This preprint has been removed from the appropriate section of The Lancet because the study's conclusions are not supported by its methodology. The Lancet reserves the right to remove a published article if we determine that it violates our selection criteria.”

It is also important to pay attention to the authors of this preprint. Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist and vaccine skeptic from Texas, consistently promotes treatment of COVID-19 with the veterinary antiparasitic drug ivermectin (its effectiveness not proven, it is not intended for human use at all), and distributes unreliable information about the number of people affected by vaccination. McCullough's co-author, Dr. Harvey Risch - supporter treatment of coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine (a drug that has not proven its effectiveness), his statements also sorted it out fact checkers. Pathologist Roger Hodkinson called coronavirus was the greatest hoax and claimed that it was no worse than the flu, although at the time he made this statement, the death rate from COVID-19 in the United States was at least four times higher than the death rate from any strain of influenza. Another co-author, Dr. William Makis also distributed false information, claiming that patients who refuse vaccination will be prescribed drugs for mental disorders, although this is not the case.

The data from the preprint that went viral on social networks also does not coincide with the results of other scientists whose articles were nevertheless peer-reviewed and published in the same journal The Lancet. For example, in May 2022, experts from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shared analysis of 340,522 reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). After receiving the vaccine twice, 4,496 people (1.32%) died, but the researchers found no pattern between these deaths and vaccination - these people did die after receiving the shots, but there is no evidence that they died because of it. “It is encouraging that reactions to mRNA vaccines are generally mild and subside within one or two days, supporting clinical trial reports and patient observation data,” emphasized One of the authors of the study is Tom Shimabukuro.

Thus, there was no Lancet study on vaccines causing death. The frightening figure was contained in the preprint - a preliminary study that was not accepted for publication and has not been peer-reviewed by authoritative representatives of the scientific community. After review, the preprint was retracted because the research methodology did not meet the standards of a scientific journal. Among the authors of this preprint are vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists, whose false statements have been repeatedly refuted by fact checkers.

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