Hmmm.

Reinfection study hyped by Coronadoom Twitter has weird missing data.

Eric Topol, one of the most mentally vacant Corona astrologers in the Western hemisphere, recently tweeted about this preprint on why being reinfected with SARS-2 is worse than not being reinfected with SARS-2. It’s an observational study built from US Department of Veterans Affairs databases, comparing 6-month mortality and severe outcome rates in 38,926 reinfected people, against 257,427 once-infected people, and a control group of 5,396,855 uninfected people.

The study examined outcomes through 4 September 2021, so it doesn’t account for reinfections with the milder Omicron. Even so, I think the authors substantially overestimate the risks of reinfection, but that’s a matter for a future post, if it even matters. Here, I’ll just note a suspicious oddity I found while rooting around in the figures and the supplementary tables – an oddity surrounding specifically the one portion of the paper that might matter for assessing the effectiveness of the vaccines.