Is the Yale LISTEN Study Valid?
When subjects band together in a public forum, is a study beyond redemption?
The LISTEN Study at Yale seems to be crowd-sourcing chronic post-vaccination syndrome (PVS) cases through self-reporting via surveys that guide respondents into associating any mental or physical health issues with vaccination events. I wrote recently about a related and flawed preprint touching on PVS. (Its validity as a “syndrome” is questionable.)
The goal of Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent vaccines-autism paper in 1998 was to establish a narrative of widespread vaccine harms. He stood to make millions from it.
There are groups involved here — mainly, REACT19 and the associated MAHA crowd — that may be poised equivalently, with clear ties to the larger anti-vax and MAHA machines.
The preprint mentioned above initially became a flash point due to a lack of disclosure around it. Those issues were rectified — but after media coverage had passed, a common “oopsie” for bad preprints, I’ve found. The preprint included the head of medRxiv as an author, who also co-authored an earlier preprint with similar disclosure problems and some of the same, conflicted authors. These problems were not rectified. I covered all this earlier.
Everything about these preprints was concerning.
Now, thanks to a recent essay in STAT News, the LISTEN Study seems to be fundamentally compromised.