Stock up on bog roll here we go again

west didsblue said:
Alberto Boretti appears to be a research professor in Mechanical Engineering with a history in the automotive industry.

Unless there’s two of them in Melbourne!!
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I am not even sure that is actually who this author is! It could be an instance of “credential farming”, where an actual person’s name and CV are attributed fraudulently to an article (or series of articles). Often they don’t even use people with credentials applicable to the subject matter. In this case, they may have chosen Boretti because “MIT” can be put as a quick institution reference, with many never checking to see it isn’t the famous MIT, but rather essentially a for profit tech training enterprise in Melbourne.

It could also be the case that Albert Parker is branching out...
 
SebastianBlue said:
I am not even sure that is actually who this author is! It could be an instance of “credential farming”, where an actual person’s name and CV are attributed fraudulently to an article (or series of articles). Often they don’t even use people with credentials applicable to the subject matter. In this case, they may have chosen Boretti because “MIT” can be put as a quick institution reference, with many never checking to see it isn’t the famous MIT, but rather essentially a for profit tech training enterprise in Melbourne.

It could also be the case that Albert Parker is branching out...
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It also would appear that the apparent author is also into climate change denial.

Bottom line is that it would seem safe to say that the article is bollocks.
 
In every virus thread there are antivaxxers that claim "my dad's mate's son's friend was an athlete until he had the vaccine, and then he had a heart attack."
Their brains are programmed to jump to the conclusion and believe any conspiracy bullshit.
 
west didsblue said:
It also would appear that the apparent author is also into climate change denial.

Bottom line is that it would seem safe to say that the article is bollocks.
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That’d be Mr. Albert Parker, who has also published under one Alberto Berotti.

At any rate, I obviously agree that the “article” is highly suspect.
 
SebastianBlue said:
That’d be Mr. Albert Parker, who has also published under one Alberto Berotti.

At any rate, I obviously agree that the “article” is highly suspect.
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I suspect a Venn diagram of climate change deniers and Covid/vaccine deniers would be two almost identical concentric circles.
 
Vaccines work, there is a long and varied history of vaccines working, diseases have been irradiated because vaccines work. Mortality rates have decreased rapidly because vaccines work.
Anyone who says vaccines cause more harm than good is a **** and not worth arguing with, and to add to that they should go and shake hands with someone with MPOX and see how they get on, after all it can't be that back because they've given it a trendy name. Ffs.
 
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SebastianBlue said:
That’d be Mr. Albert Parker, who has also published under one Alberto Berotti.

At any rate, I obviously agree that the “article” is highly suspect.
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He's big on ivermectin use vs Covid too.
Given one of the papers is allegedly in a journal called Organocatalysis, I concur with "highly suspect".
 
PPT said:
I know of two, young, healthy men who both died of heart attacks shortly after having the vaccine. Coincidence? Maybe…
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I’m sure I could “know of” two young people having heart attacks after the vaccine if I googled it.
However I don’t actually “know” anyone who has had a heart attack following the vaccine and I bet you don’t either, otherwise you’d have said.
 
west didsblue said:
I’m sure I could “know of” two young people having heart attacks after the vaccine if I googled it.
However I don’t actually “know” anyone who has had a heart attack following the vaccine and I bet you don’t either, otherwise you’d have said.
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I read the eulogy for one of them at his funeral.
Is that good enough for you or do you want to cause
an argument as usual?
 
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SebastianBlue said:
It is important to note a few things about this article:

1) it is a single author article

2) it is not peer-reviewed

3) it is published on an open-access online journal (which itself looks highly dubious based on its publishing rules and published articles)

4) it is a compilation article, meaning no actual research was conducted; it is only a selected review of other studies and articles, that may or may not themselves be peer-reviewed or represent primary research

5) based on a quick search of the author (Alberto A. Boretti), they do not appear to be someone with any expertise related to COVID, virology, immunology, or really the medical field in general. They supposedly work at the Melbourne Institute of Technology (MIT):

“a private tertiary educational institution catering to local and international students in Australia at campuses in Melbourne and Sydney. It has a NEAS-accredited English Language Centre[4] and offers undergraduate and postgraduate courses in business, accounting, management, marketing, information technology, data analytics, research, software engineering, computer networking and telecommunications engineering.”

But it is difficult to determine their specific field of expertise (if any). As far as I can tell, they recently began publishing articles that reference dubious or outright debunked studies regarding COVID and the dangers of vaccines more broadly, including the discredited fallacious link between vaccines and Autism. And they have been prolific in doing so over the last eight months, publishing far too many articles for any of them to have been primary research or peer-reviewed.

After doing some more digging, it is also unclear whether this Alberto Boretti is actually Albert Parker, who seems to be a bit of a nutter / “researcher for hire”. All of his previous work prior to January 2024 have related to renewable energy policy and development, and appear to be industry-funded bunk articles.

I do not think this article should be considered credible without reviewing each and every cited study and article within it.
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Let me just add something, as someone who is currently carrying out a scoping review for my master's thesis. While it does not involve any original research, it's a perfectly valid method of summarizing the research in a given field and offering insights that individual small-scale studies can't. Systematic reviews and meta-analysis are actually what most decisions in medicine are based on precisely for that reason.

It involves giving a detailed an extensive account of exactly how you conducted the search in order to ensure that no stone was unturned, and the efforts you went to to ensure the reliability and validity of your results. Including but not limited to performing all stages separately with a large team and then discussing any differences in analysis. The methodology stage of the report would include a detailed account of the search terms you used, how many results you found, the criteria you used to include or exclude papers, what data you extracted, and how you intended to synthesize that data with references to various models for each stage. I reckon my methodology section will be approximately 3000 words when I'm finished. Now this isn't a scoping review, but a narrative review should be similarly robust in its methodology is that's the entire paper.

With all of that in mind, I will now copy and paste the entirety of the paper's methodology section:

"A literature review is performed by using the google scholar database."

So yeah, his methodology was "I did a search on Google and picked the papers I liked the look of." That isn't research, it's propaganda.
 
I'm With Stupid said:
Let me just add something, as someone who is currently carrying out a scoping review for my master's thesis. While it does not involve any original research, it's a perfectly valid method of summarizing the research in a given field and offering insights that individual small-scale studies can't. Systematic reviews and meta-analysis are actually what most decisions in medicine are based on precisely for that reason.

It involves giving a detailed an extensive account of exactly how you conducted the search in order to ensure that no stone was unturned, and the efforts you went to to ensure the reliability and validity of your results. Including but not limited to performing all stages separately with a large team and then discussing any differences in analysis. The methodology stage of the report would include a detailed account of the search terms you used, how many results you found, the criteria you used to include or exclude papers, what data you extracted, and how you intended to synthesize that data with references to various models for each stage. I reckon my methodology section will be approximately 3000 words when I'm finished. Now this isn't a scoping review, but a narrative review should be similarly robust in its methodology is that's the entire paper.

With all of that in mind, I will now copy and paste the entirety of the paper's methodology section:

"A literature review is performed by using the google scholar database."

So yeah, his methodology was "I did a search on Google and picked the papers I liked the look of." That isn't research, it's propaganda.
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To be clear, I wasn’t suggesting that a compilation article is inherently problematic (this isn’t actually a meta-analysis, as that would require actual data analysis, methodological rigour, and stat sig findings, with peer-review and likely revision). I wouldn’t even actually hold it to be a narrative review, for the reasons you and I have outlined.

I was only highlighting that it did not represent primary research and articles like these do need to be carefully scrutinised, as their credibility and relevance largely depends on the cited work.

This was particularly important given the context in which it was entered in to the discussion.
 
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