This week brought another spate of predictable headlines about a worthless paper (Stock, S.J., Carruthers, J., Calvert, C. et al. SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination rates in pregnant women in Scotland. Nat Med (2022), published in a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal. Although the paper’s defects are glaring, its message supports current policies.
Surprisingly, this is not the usual case of reporters misrepresenting results. The paper is explicit in its misinformation. The abstract ends with, “Addressing low vaccine uptake rates in pregnant women is imperative to protect the health of women and babies in the ongoing pandemic,” and the discussion begins with, “Our findings emphasize the need for continued efforts to increase vaccination uptake in pregnant women, especially in younger and more deprived populations.” (As an aside, note how verbose passive constructions are used to make the advice seem more authoritative and scientific. If the authors had written in simple English, “We should vaccinate more pregnant women for their own good and that of their babies,” it would have sounded more like the editorial it is.)
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