MSU Professor Mark Skidmore was exonerated by MSU; his landmark paper showing over 250,000 killed by the COVID vaccine is now back in the peer-reviewed literature

substack.com ^ | Oct 21, 2023 | Steve Kirsch

[ransomnote]

After a 7 month review by his university, Mark Skidmore, was exonerated of all charges and his new, improved paper was published in a more credible peer-reviewed journal.

Steve Kirsch

Oct 21, 2023

 

Michigan State University Professor Mark Skidmore was exonerated of all ethics charges after a 7-month investigation. His paper was revised and was reinstated in the peer-reviewed literature. It revealed that over 250,000 people were killed by the COVID vaccine. Others have found similar numbers.

Executive summary

Mark Skidmore wrote a paper that showed that 217,000 Americans were killed in 2021 by the COVID vaccine.

The journal retracted the article and Mark’s university commenced a 7-month investigation into unethical behavior by Professor Skidmore.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that Professor Skidmore has been exonerated on all charges and his paper, with some helpful additions suggested by Dr. Susan Oliver (and her dog, Cindy), has now been published in another peer-reviewed journal.

The news on the investigation and the paper

See this press release that Mark sent me.

The press release was drafted by the Liberty Counsel who was instrumental in defending Mark in the investigation by Michigan State University. If you want to support their work, please donate here.

Bottom line: After a 7-month ethics investigation, Michigan State University found that Mark did nothing wrong!

Note: What this really means is that they tried for 7 months to find something they could nail him on, and they failed.

The new paper is now published in a peer-reviewed journal

COVID-19 Illness and Vaccination Experiences in Social Circles Affect COVID-19 Vaccination Decisions.

Here is an excerpt:

With these survey data, the total number of fatalities due to COVID-19 inoculation may be as high as 289,789 (95% CI: 229,319 – 344,319). The large difference in the possible number of fatalities due to COVID-19 vaccination that emerges from this survey and the available governmental data should be further investigated.

Let me translate that for you. Here’s the “plain English” version (my embellished interpretation):

“Our survey showed that there’s a good chance that 290,000 Americans (and maybe as many as 344,000) may have lost their lives due to taking the COVID vaccine and that’s in 2021 alone! That’s a lot of people and it’s a lot more than the US government claims. And for the record, this isn’t the only survey that found this. For example, the Rasmussen survey found a similar number of people were killed by the vaccine and the virus. So did other firms. So how come there isn’t an investigation to determine conclusively who is telling people the truth here? What’s wrong with you people? Instead of trying to censor the data, maybe it is high time we started talking about it so we can finally determine who is telling the truth and who is lying to you.”

Background

Here are the previous articles that I’ve written about Mark Skidmore’s paper.

If you have time to read only two articles, here are the top two I’d recommend:

1. New peer-reviewed study: >217,000 Americans killed by the COVID vaccines in just the first year alone!

2. It's time we hold these people accountable; let the lawsuits begin

The article, “What the "Defenders of Science" Miss About the Purpose of Scientific Peer-Review and the Open Dialogue: When You Censor or Support the Censorship of Dissident Voices, You Are In the Wrong” is an excellent summary also of how papers such as Mark’s, are retracted unethically.

Here’s an article recapping the whole thing by James Lyons-Weiler: Dr. Mark Skidmore Exonerated

 

Acknowledgment

Mark would like to thank Dr. Susan Oliver (and her dog Cindy) for all their helpful suggestions. Susan was nice enough to make a helpful video for Mark to ensure that even the most nit-picky peer-reviewer wouldn’t be able to find any errors.

Mark incorporated her suggestions into his revised paper to make it even stronger.

LA Times opinion

Why anti-vaxxers are pretending a flawed study on vacccine deaths has been vindicated

MICHAEL HILTZIK, business columnist for the LA Times, basically repurposed David Gorski’s new hit piece. It’s the same old arguments as they used before that the survey didn’t verify the deaths were caused by the vaccine. That’s right. The survey didn’t do that and never claimed to have done that.

What the survey did is say, “Whoa! We could have a MAJOR problem here; how do you explain all the carnage?”

Any objective scientist looking at that data would have to agree: this is smoke. Mark pointed out it was smoke.

Hiltzik should be writing about how nobody seems to want to investigate this signal.

So I decided to run my own survey. Nearly all my followers are anti-vaxxers; for most of their households, NOBODY in the household took the vaccine. So my respondents are biased; we’d expect there to be way fewer deaths in their households from the COVID vaccine because of so few vaccinations. Yet, we found around 1.5X more COVID vaccine deaths than COVID virus deaths in their households. That’s insane. We have a VERY deadly vaccine here. So how does Hiltzik explain that?

Summary 

So it’s now back in the scientific peer-reviewed literature that over 250,000 people were killed by the COVID vaccine in 2021 alone.

Other independent surveys (like Rasmussen and the outside surveys I’ve done) all are consistent with those numbers that the vaccine killed a comparable number to the virus. So that’s very validating of Mark’s numbers.

Remember that Rasmussen surveyed the general public. Over half the general public thinks the vaccines have killed nobody. So they are not reliably assessing vaccine caused deaths because they’ve been gaslit by the mainstream press and their doctors. So you should be VERY concerned that the Rasmussen survey found comparable numbers because it means that the reality is more likely than not that the the vaccine has killed more people than COVID.

So how are they going to explain the results which are verifiable and which can be replicated?

Answer: They will not. They will ignore it. Because they cannot explain it. Gaslighting people on this is too hard. That’s why they had to get the paper unethically retracted when it came out. Now that it’s out, they will ignore it. No fact checks, nothing. Silence.

Please help share the good news about Mark Skidmore with others. It’s important we let the world know that their governments have been lying to them.

[exDemMom]

And after The Lancet nuked any credibility that peer reviewed papers had, we should trust peer review now?

What are you talking about?

One piece of advice for dealing with someone who has obvious expertise in science: don't spring on them stuff you read on an antivax/anti-science website and expect them to know immediately what you are talking about.

The way such things *should* go down is that you would link to a blog that claims that Lancet has been discredited forever because of X, Y, and Z. Then I would read the blog and read the relevant Lancet articles. Afterwards, I would return and explain to you how the blog misrepresented whatever happened with respect to Lancet and what really is going on. Only then, when you cannot refute a single word of my explanation, would you get all upset and call me a Big Pharma shill/CDC hack/whatever.

This is how my interactions with people who have been hoodwinked by antivax/anti-science charlatans usually go. I have provided this sequence of events for your future reference.

[metmom]

The way such things *should* go down is that you would link to a blog that claims that Lancet has been discredited forever because of X, Y, and Z.

I'm not buying into conspiracy theories despite your frequent accusations.

They lied. Period.

They have destroyed the trust people put in them like any liar would.

It s not conspiracy theory territory to conclude that if they were caught doing it once or twice, that they've done it before and will do it again.

It's common sense and only someone naive or totally gullible would just go on blindly trusting someone who has proved themselves untrustworthy.

Trust needs to be earned. It's not a God given right, and once it's lost is VERY difficult to get back again.

[grey_whiskers]

With more than 81.4% of us vaccinated (the number has not been updated since May), if the vaccines are as dangerous as antivax professionals claim, why haven't more of us dropped dead?

By your specious logic, cigarettes are safe too.

I don't trust Big Pharma scientists any more than tobacco scientists.

Science is not based on consensus; nor on credentials.

Nice try, troll.

[Trump Girl Kit Cat]

EXCELLENT POINT, I smoked for 40 years and didn’t drop dead either or contract lung cancer!! SOME people would love react to the vaccine SOME will not, there have been a whole lot of athletes having an adverse effect and dying of heart attacks!!

[Jane Long]

I smell (another) govt plant.

[exDemMom]

They lied. Period.

They have destroyed the trust people put in them like any liar would.

Once again, what are the specifics? What did the journal The Lancet say that was a demonstrable lie? If they lied, then certainly, you should be able to say what the specific lie(s) is (are) or at least provide a link. You can't just post random unsubstantiated claims that The Lancet lied and expect to be convincing.

Oh, BTW, posting such claims is a big indicator that you are prone to believing conspiracies, whether you deny believing in conspiracies or not.

A little information about not only The Lancet, but every other reputable medical/scientific journal in existence. These journals exist to publish research reports written by scientists and research-trained MDs working in a variety of public and private organizations all over the world. The content of those research reports is not written by journal staff, nor do they represent the opinions of the journal staff. So, the claim that a journal "lied" is a bit puzzling, to say the least. This is like saying the office supply catalog I just got in the mail lied.

[metmom]

The Lancet’s reputation continues to decline: Whether its reputation in the medical field will survive its conduct relative to COVID remains questionable
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3979181/posts

Now the world’s most famous medical journal the Lancet is accused of costing lives by sitting on a study showing human transmission of Covid-19 that was suppressed by China
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3978984/posts

The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3852581/posts

A Second Major COVID-19 Study Is Retracted; First the Lancet, Now the New England Journal of Medicine
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3852676/posts

Lancet Formally Retracts Fake Hydroxychloroquine Study Used By Media To Attack Trump
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3852150/posts

The Lancet casts doubt over its own Hydroxychloroquine study
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3851745/posts

And there are more than that if you do a keyword search on *Lancet*.

Between these examples and what we know of peer review in regard to the whole climate change hoax, peer review itself has also been discredited as well.

The scientific community is nothing more than the old boys club back slapping and high fiving each other for promoting whatever the official narrative is at the moment.

[grey_whiskers]

Maybe. But from some of her posting history, it sounds like COVID-19⁸⁴ was "The moment of GLORY!" for her subdivision of SCIENCE!™ and she dived in headfirst, emotionally committing, and either misplaced pride or embarrassment, kept her from walking it back when all the scotch-tape, haphazard diagnostics (and chintzy safety testing, corner-cutting production methods, changing production methods between approved prototype and the mass-production live rollout, covering up everything fro adverse events in safety testing to not testing for biologically significant contaminants, to systemic distribution of injection product in vivo beyond that which was promised/expected, etc . etc. ad infinitum ad nauseam) ...and the very odd government contracts pressed on governments by the Big Pharma manufacturers,

all came out.

Especially when the deleterious effects of the clot shots showed up.

[grey_whiskers]

They're not conspiracy theories. Ever look up the SEC report from Moderna, about how their RNA shots were counted as experimental genevtherapies by the FDA, so they couldn't get (either funding, or maybe approvals, I don't remember which, off the top of my head, three years later)? And the subsequent gleeful presentation by the (CEO of CFO) after Emergency Use Authorization, and how many billions they were raking in?

Not conspiracy theories.

Spoiler alerts.

[exDemMom]

By your specious logic, cigarettes are safe too.

Right. There happens to be a ton of high quality research that shows the deleterious effects of using tobacco. Our everyday observations are consistent with this scientific opinion, since most of us probably know someone who died from a tobacco related illness, even though less than 10% of the population uses tobacco. My own father died of a lung disease caused by smoking.

On the other hand, the only "evidence" we have that vaccines are dangerous comes from professional antivaxxers who keep telling us they are dangerous. They can produce no scientific studies to support their claims. If we are to believe some of their wildest claims, everyone who got vaccinated is supposed to die soon. (The exact timeframe keeps getting pushed back, as we keep failing to die.) The US has 332 million people, of whom 81% or 270 million or 4 of every 5 people have received one dose of vaccine.

So, if the predictions of widespread death due to vaccine were based on the results of actual scientific studies, I would expect to see people dropping dead all the time by now. It's been over two years since the vaccines were rolled out, but where are all the dead people? Why aren't the stores empty when I go shopping? Why aren't most of my friends and family dead? Why aren't I dead?

You see, when scientists have established that something is harmful to health, there is a strong likelihood that you actually know or know of people who have died from that thing. But when a bunch of kooks make a claim that something is dangerous despite a complete lack of scientific evidence, you won't actually see or hear of anyone dying from it, because that's not happening.

Oh, I know that professional creators of antivax rhetoric love to use that word "consensus" to try to discredit scientists. However, when scientists reach a consensus, it means that they are all doing research and coming up with consistent results. For example, it rained this morning. If I were to go around asking my neighbors, they would probably tell me that the ground is now wet. If I find that 100 people in my neighborhood agree that the ground is wet, the fact that they have a consensus does NOT invalidate the fact that the ground is wet. It means that they all made the same observation.

Science is about doing research and obtaining results that are consistent with the theory and previous research in the field.

Oh, FYI. Most "Big Pharma" activity is centered around manufacturing and sales of drugs. Most early drug development takes place at research institutes, biotech companies, and universities. There is quite a complicated process involved in taking an early drug candidate and getting a pharmaceutical company to sponsor further development. So, your distrust of "Big Pharma" scientists basically means that you distrust any scientist who does research. The bottom line is that just about all research is aimed towards the development of better drugs, no matter who does the research where.

[grey_whiskers]

You are a walking, talking advertisement for the reproducibility crisis.

In particular when one is dealing with complex biological systems where even the assay methods are subject to systematic limitations and uncertainties, to say nothing of the large number of unknown confounding variables, which are only (hopefully) mitigated by using large numbers of test subjects.
You know, like the safety study for some clotshot related item in NEJM which used 8 mice.

[grey_whiskers]

Maybe. But from some of her posting history, it sounds like COVID-19⁸⁴ was "The moment of GLORY!" for her subdivision of SCIENCE!™ and she dived in headfirst, emotionally committing, and either misplaced pride or embarrassment, kept her from walking it back when all the scotch-tape, haphazard diagnostics (and chintzy safety testing, corner-cutting production methods, changing production methods between approved prototype and the mass-production live rollout, covering up everything fro adverse events in safety testing to not testing for biologically significant contaminants, to systemic distribution of injection product in vivo beyond that which was promised/expected, etc . etc. ad infinitum ad nauseam) ...and the very odd government contracts pressed on governments by the Big Pharma manufacturers,

all came out.

Especially when the deleterious effects of the clot shots showed up.

[Jane Long]

China Virus Conspiracy Theorists = 1,000

Pfizerbucks $hot $hills = 0

And, now, there's this....

Yet another "we told you so" moment from the "antivaxx conspiracy theorists" who are the only ones that seem to care what happens to people.

And yes, we were silenced.

H/t @real_GGoswami https://t.co/40y1HtpyGT pic.twitter.com/l3GRUo7E7A— Jikkyleaks 🐭 (@Jikkyleaks) October 26, 2023

[grey_whiskers]

Right. There happens to be a ton of high quality research that shows the deleterious effects of using tobacco. Our everyday observations are consistent with this scientific opinion, since most of us probably know someone who died from a tobacco related illness, even though less than 10% of the population uses tobacco. My own father died of a lung disease caused by smoking.

Hindsight is always 20/20, dingbat. The tobacco scientists hid behind the "not PROVEN!" excuse that you shot shills are, until the non-controlled data became too much to ignore, and honest studies were done.

But even with that, many of the harmful effects of smoking only manifested over decades.

But somehow, even your own father dying from smoking-related causes, doesn't keep you from raising your eyebrows and archly taunting "Where are all the dead bodies?" only a couple years after the mass introduction of the clot shots; and after a rash of notable deaths and other never-before-seen happenings, such as multiple on-air personalities passing out or having seizures on camera, or world-class athletes personally discussing their cardiovascular side effects within a day or a couple of days of the clot-shots.

Get rekt, troll.

[Fury]

Nice try.

Sadly people on the Internet pushing this professor’s work as being exonerated are either ignorant, willfully ignorant or insufficient intellect to understand.

It is what is is.

[exDemMom]

Oh, finally, at last, some links. Unfortunately, they are to other FR posts, not directly to the scientific literature. This makes more work for me, since I actually do track down the original sources and read them before I can comment. Link #1: The assertion that The Lancet's reputation has been damaged is an opinion/wishful thinking written by a blogger who published in American Thinker and who used the less-than-credible magazine Vanity Fair as a source. This is not based on any survey of how scientists view the credibility of The Lancet.

The full text of the letter to the editor published in The Lancet is this:

Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19

We are public health scientists who have closely followed the emergence of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and are deeply concerned about its impact on global health and wellbeing. We have watched as the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China, in particular, have worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak, put in place significant measures to reduce its impact, and share their results transparently with the global health community. This effort has been remarkable.

We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat.

The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife as have so many other emerging pathogens. This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine13 and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture. We want you, the science and health professionals of China, to know that we stand with you in your fight against this virus.

We invite others to join us in supporting the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of Wuhan and across China. Stand with our colleagues on the frontline!

We speak in one voice. To add your support for this statement, sign our letter online. LM is editor of ProMED-mail. We declare no competing interests.

I can assure you that in no way did The Lancet's decision to publish this letter to the editor damage The Lancet's reputation or credibility among the research community.

I will point out that the scientists of China are comparable to any of their US or European counterparts. Many of them were actually educated in the US. We must never conflate the work of the Chinese scientists with the early efforts of the communist Chinese government to shut down and persecute the scientists and physicians who did the early work to characterize the outbreak and identify the causative agent.

As the letter authors pointed out, by the time this letter was published on March 07, 2020, there was already a solid body of evidence indicating that the outbreak occurred because of an animal to human transmission of a novel coronavirus occurring at the Huanan seafood market. By now, more than three years later, the body of evidence has grown considerably.

The ProMED-mail mentioned at the end of the letter is a website run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases in which infectious disease experts around the world inform each other about disease outbreaks and new developments on existing infectious diseases.

Here is a helpful hint: never expect the scientific community to validate antivax/anti-science conspiracies and rhetoric. It's not going to happen.

Due to the fact that this post is already several hundred words long, I am not going to discuss the other FR links that you posted. However, if you really insist, I am fully capable of discussing them. Just not now. It takes time to track down and read information, and I have other things to do.

[grey_whiskers]

And in comes another $hot $hill in a futile attempt to earn his salary.

[metmom]

I didn’t expect anything but an off hand dismissal of other sources from you.

Anything that goes against your or the medical community’s narrative is by default discredited by you all.

[MountainDad]

Please drop the "ex" and "mom" from your handle.

You are now DEM

[grey_whiskers]

https://www.nysun.com/article/lancet-medical-journal-after-debate-and-discussion-refuses-to-call-for-release-of-all-hostages

Because this is state-of-the-art SCIENCE™!

Get rekt, troll.