Doshi on the flu shot
An early foray into denialism and conspiracy theories was his 2005 claim, in the BMJ, that flu death estimates were heavily flawed: “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” asked Doshi, and followed up with an article for the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) and for Harper's Magazine, in which he – possibly wilfully – failed to “understand the system or the basis for the estimates. Moreover if one really counted [non-respiratory] flu-associated deaths the figure could easily be a gross underestimate.” Doshi, however, undeterred by his failure to understand the topic, went on (in 2008) to publish a paper questioning the risk of pandemic influenza in the American Journal of Public Health, where he suggested that falling flu mortality rates in the decades after 1919 is not “the result of influenza vaccination” but of “improvement in living conditions or naturally acquired immunity.” He was invited to and spoke at a 2009 conference (discussed here) arranged by the Joseph Mercola-funded anti-vaccine organization the National Vaccine Information Center together with Andrew Wakefield.
Doshi's flu nonsense has, if anything, become even crankier in later years. In a JAMA Internal Medicine opinion paper (not a research paper!) from 2013, Doshi questioned, based on no evidence, the idea that influenza is a “major public health threat for which the annual vaccine offers a safe and effective solution”. His main gambit was a nirvana fallacy (because flu vaccines aren’t 100% effective they are worthless, even if they still save thousands of lives), but he also toyed with germ theory denialism, claiming, against all facts and evidence, that “influenza viruses appear to be a minor contributor” to flu. The piece followed another nonsense opinion piece in The BMJ that played up potential dangers of flu shots and questioned their efficacy, and which was widely celebrated by anti-vaccine groups. Again, it is important to note that Doshi is not an epidemiologist but an anthropologist who has “completed a fellowship in comparative effectiveness research” but no research into influenza or vaccines. Given that the antivaxx group tended to respond with claims like “Johns Hopkins Scientist Reveals Shocking Report on Flu Vaccines”, even Johns Hopkins had to intervene to point out that Doshi “has no scientific affiliation with Johns Hopkins, nor is he employed by any of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions”. Because of his lack of actual expertise in real vaccine research (but the potential to try to distort the image to make it look like he has such expertise), Doshi was an “expert witness” for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense.
COVID
Doshi was quick to go denialist on COVID-19 vaccines, too; even before the initial vaccine trials had finished, Doshi went on to suggest that the trials couldn’t show that COVID-19 vaccines prevent severe cases. Real virologists were not impressed with Doshi’s errors and misinformation, in particular his inept and deranged nonsense about methodological issues (Doshi claimed that the trials should not have excluded people who had flu-like symptoms but not COVID – and for whom the COVID vaccine obviously didn’t have much benefit – from the “have COVID” group). Anti-vaccine groups and anti-vaccine legislators like Ron Johnson were impressed, however, and Doshi was promptly invited to testify before a government panel, where he claimed that most COVID-19 hospitalizations were among vaccinated people, based on a report error that swapped the word “vaccinated” with “unvaccinated” – easily corrected, of course, unless you’ve already committed yourself to a conclusion. Doshi also claimed that mRNA vaccines are not really vaccines.
In 2022, Doshi managed to publish (together with a number of other anti-vaccine-adjacent conspiracy theorists like Joseph Fraiman, Sander Greenland and Patrick Whelan) a worthless exercise in p-hacking (to bias its results “in favor of the conclusion that the risk of serious adverse [vaccine-related] events are greater than the risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes”) in the BMJ itself, which went viral among anti-vaccine groups and is debunked e.g. here, here and here. In the paper, Doshi also treated the VAERS database as if it were a robust source, which it doesn’t even try to be, so even without the p-hacking it would have been stunningly worthless. (A hilariously inept defense of the paper by Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London, must be seen to be believed.)
For the New York Times, Doshi also co-authored a piece with antivaccine activist and Goop promoter Jennifer Block on COVID vaccine rollout problems, which the piece described as “needlessly divisive to use pressure, shame or mandates to get people vaccinated.”
Miscellaneous
Back in the days, Doshi also signed a letter supporting the HIV/AIDS denialist group Rethinking AIDS, which aimed to counter what they perceived as the false narrative pushed by “the AIDS industry and media” that “only a handful of scientists who doubt the HIV-AIDS hypothesis”. Actual HIV-denying scientists with relevant credentials don’t amount to even what can reasonably be called “a handful”, and Doshi has later repudiated the association; his name is still on the list, however.
Here is a decent illustration of Doshi’s proclivity to see nefarious conspiracy theories all around him.
Diagnosis: Denialist and hack who likes to pontificate on issues outside of his areas of expertise – a common enough type of character trait in denialist circles, but Doshi has, somehow, managed to hold onto a position as editor of the BMJ. He is, accordingly, in a position to cause immense harm with misinformation and conspiracy theories. The broader question, however, is of course: What the hell is wrong with the BMJ?
Hat-tip: Rationalwiki
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