Business
How a blunder by a respected medical journal is fueling an anti-vaccine lie
The paper published by the respected British Medical Journal earlier this month was eye-opening, to say the least. It questioned why excess deaths in Western countries remained unusually elevated during the COVID-19 pandemic even after vaccines were introduced in 2021.
The implication seemed clear: Rather than reducing cases and deaths, the COVID vaccines had fueled the tragic tide.
That finding was picked up within 48 hours by the Telegraph, a conservative British daily. It leaped across the Atlantic Ocean to the New York Post, a part of the Murdoch media empire, one day later.
Various news outlets have claimed that this research implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. This study does not establish any such link.
— British Medical Journal
Since then, it has been widely spread on social media by the anti-vaccination camp. The repetitions have become increasingly febrile, with some tweets blaming the vaccines for tens of millions of deaths.
Here’s what you need to know: There is no truth to this finding, or to the anti-vaccine camp’s interpretation of the BMJ paper.
The journal, which posted the paper on its Public Health webpage on June 3, has acknowledged that. In a public statement issued June 6, after the faulty interpretation began to spread worldwide, the journal observed: “Various news outlets have claimed that this research implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. This study does not establish any such link.”
On the contrary, the journal wrote, “Vaccines have, in fact, been instrumental in reducing the severe illness and death associated with COVID-19 infection.”
Alas, the journal’s warning came too late. As I write, the Telegraph’s June 4 tweet hawking its misleading story has received 1.5 million views on X (formerly-Twitter), but the BMJ’s warning notice, only 388,000 views.
These figures are proof positive of the old saw (attributed to Winston Churchill, among many others) that “a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”
Some researchers argue that the original paper, by a team of Dutch scientists, was so shoddy and inconsequential that it should not have been published at all.
Among the critics is Ariel Karlinsky, an Israeli economist and statistician whose data constituted the core of the Dutch paper. Karlinsky has written that the BMJ should retract the paper and “open an inquiry into what happened there with editors and reviewers.” The journal hasn’t responded.
The use that anti-vaccine propagandists have made of the BMJ paper underscores the dangers of disinformation in public health today.
A recent study in Science analyzed the impact of what its authors labeled “vaccine-skeptical” published content on vaccine refusal. The authors examined anti-vaccine posts on Facebook during the first three months of the COVID vaccine rollout in early 2021.
They found that posts flagged by third-party fact-checkers as false received a relatively minimal 8.7 million views in that period. Posts that were not flagged by fact-checkers but “nonetheless implied that vaccines were harmful to health — many of which were from credible mainstream news outlets — were viewed hundreds of millions of times.”
The flagged posts were more likely to inspire vaccine resistance, the authors wrote. Although unflagged posts individually had less impact on vaccine sentiment, the volume of those posts was so immense that cumulatively they did more damage to vaccine rates.
A single vaccine-skeptical article in the Chicago Tribune — headlined “A healthy doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID vaccine; CDC is investigating why” — was viewed by more than 50 million users on Facebook, more than 20% of the platform’s U.S. user base. That was “more than six times the number of views than all flagged misinformation combined.”
It’s also true that articles that may be innocuous or inconclusive at their core can be distorted and magnified into explicitly anti-vaccine messages by being passed through the anti-vax network.
Something of the kind happened with the BMJ paper. Its language alluding to “serious concerns” about the impact of vaccines and “containment measures” such as lockdowns on excess deaths was transmogrified into the Telegram’s headline stating that “Covid vaccines may have helped fuel rise in excess deaths” and similar language in the New York Post.
The anti-vaxx camp, in repeating these claims, did so after removing or minimizing most of the qualifying language. The headline on a report published by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, stated that the COVID vaccines “likely fueled rise in excess deaths,” attributing that conclusion to “mainstream media.”
The CHD report cited a blog post by anti-vaxx crusader Meryl Nass, republishing the Telegraph article. The Nass post was headlined “The Dam Has Broken,” suggesting that major news sources were now accepting the dangers of the COVID vaccines.
Nass, by the way, is a Maine physician who has had her license suspended and been fined $10,000 for having prescribed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, two medicines known to be useless in treating COVID-19, to patients.
Put it all together, and the evolution of the BMJ paper into a brief claiming that the COVID vaccines are harmful to health plays into the most extreme anti-vaccine disinformation in circulation — such as the incredibly ignorant and dangerous recommendation by Joseph Ladapo, the anti-vaccine quack appointed as Florida surgeon general by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that no one under 65 take a COVID vaccine.
The medical and immunological communities have overwhelmingly concluded that the COVID-19 vaccines have massively reduced hospitalizations and death from the disease. A December 2022 report card by the Commonwealth Fund concluded that after two years of administration, the vaccines had prevented more than 18 million additional hospitalizations and more than 3 million additional deaths.
This is the progress placed at risk by the torrent of anti-vaccine propaganda purveyed by RFK Jr.’s organization and other vaccination opponents.
That brings us back to the BMJ paper and its manifest flaws.
“Excess deaths,” the metric purportedly examined by the Dutch authors, is simply the number of deaths in a country during a given period over and above those that would have been expected “under normal conditions,” based on historical patterns.
In more than 40 Western countries during the three peak years of the pandemic, the authors reported, there were 1.033 million excess deaths in 2020, about 1.26 million in 2021 and 808,000 in 2022.
The authors expressed perplexity about why excess deaths actually rose in 2021, despite the arrival of the vaccines and the implementation of social anti-pandemic measures, and remained elevated the following year. “Government leaders and policymakers,” the authors wrote, “ need to thoroughly investigate underlying causes of persistent excess mortality.”
The authors further commented that “consensus is also lacking in the medical community regarding concerns that mRNA vaccines might cause more harm than initially forecasted.” That’s a gross misrepresentation.
The consensus in the medical community is indisputably that the vaccines are safe and effective. Although they do cause occasional side effects (as do all vaccines), the health threats caused by COVID-19 itself are immeasurably more hazardous.
The truth is that the factors causing elevated excess mortality throughout the pandemic are not mysterious, but well-understood. Statistical data scientist Jeffrey S. Morris of the University of Pennsylvania put his finger on some of the most important.
One is that far more people were exposed to COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020. By the end of 2020, according to the World Health Organization, there were about 10,000 cases and about 238 deaths per million population; one year later, there 35,186 cases and 683 deaths per million. Furthermore, the COVID variants that appeared in 2021 — the Delta and Omicron waves — were far more transmissible and virulent (causing more hospitalization and death) than the initial variants.
Also in 2021, many of the most stringent anti-pandemic measures implemented in 2020 — school closings, lockdowns, business closures, mask mandates — were getting lifted by local authorities. This raised the level of exposure to the virus in the general public.
As for the vaccines, the Dutch authors seemed to conjecture that vaccination happened as if with the turning of a switch in January 2021. Of course that’s untrue.
Figures compiled by the independent statistical clearinghouse Our World in Data — which were used by the Dutch researchers — show that the vaccines were rolled out only gradually through 2021. By mid-year, only about 20% of the population of countries that submitted figures had received even a single dose; by the end of 2021, nearly 50% were still unvaccinated.
“Even with a 100% effective vaccine, we would have seen high levels of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 in 2021, leading to high number of excess deaths,” Morris observes.
Statisticians have shown that the peaks and valleys of excess mortality during the pandemic coincide almost exactly with the emergence and peaks of Delta, Omicron and other variants of concern, indicating that excess deaths are almost certainly the result of COVID, not the COVID vaccines.
One other data point: As the British actuary Stuart McDonald points out, of the 47 countries surveyed by the Dutch researchers, the 10 with the lowest rates of excess deaths are those with the highest vaccine uptakes, such as Canada (83% vaccination rate in 2022 and only 5% excess deaths in 2020-22) and Germany (76% vaccinated and 6% excess deaths). By contrast, those with the lowest vaccination rates tended to have the most excess deaths, including North Macedonia (40% vaccinated at 28% excess deaths) and Albania (45% vaccinated, 24% excess deaths).
Is there a remedy for claptrap like the BMJ article? Sadly, very little. Qualified scientists and epidemiologists have risen up almost as one to expose the flaws of the BMJ paper. But the first line of defense against disinformation must be scientific journals themselves. In this case, if not for the first time, the BMJ has failed its responsibility for being a gatekeeper of sound science.
Business
Company wants to revive Primm, the gambling spot turned ghost town. Owners say: Not so fast
A once-popular gambling mecca at the California-Nevada border that faded into obscurity could get a second life.
A Las Vegas-based truck-stop company is reportedly hoping to revive Primm to its former glory. But the would-be comeback faces a hurdle: striking a deal with the landowners, the Primm family.
In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, LV Petroleum Chief Executive Kris Roach shared his plans for the state-line ghost town.
“We would like to operate everything at the exit, the hotels, the casinos, the truck stop, the stores, pretty much from farm to table,” Roach told the Review-Journal. “We would like to revive the whole exit.”
But Cory Clemetson, president of Primm and grandson of founder Ernie Primm, said in a statement shared with The Times: “Recent reports suggesting that an agreement with any specific potential partner may be imminent are overstated and premature.”
LV Petroleum is an active operator of convenience stores and travel centers with more than 80 locations across the United States, according to its LinkedIn page.
In May, Affinity Gaming, which currently operates several businesses on behalf of the Primm family, announced a plan to close most properties it had been leasing by July 4.
Whiskey Pete’s, which along with its companion resorts at Primm drew in visitors with low prices and deals, closed in 2024. Buffalo Bill’s, which featured a 209-foot-tall roller coaster, concluded its operations in 2025.
Primm Valley Resorts, the sole operating casino in Primm, remains open until the July deadline. Other stores affected by the closure include the Primm Center, the Flying J, and the Primm Lotto Store, according to KSNV NBC Las Vegas.
Primm, an alternative to Vegas for Southern Californians that cut 45 minutes off the drive, suffered a decline in tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic and saw increased competition from tribal casinos in California.
Roach told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he did not want to see the businesses go dark, adding that 344 employees would lose their jobs following the closure. Roach said, among his plans, would be reopening Whiskey Pete’s.
But the Primm family says a deal is far from done.
“Our family is currently considering opportunities involving multiple well-established operators that have successfully operated similar hotel-casino properties in Nevada,” Clemetson said. “We will continue to explore all viable options as we work toward the best possible solution especially for the hundreds of Primm employees and their families dealing with this difficult situation.”
Modern-day Primm began in the 1950s when Ernie Primm established a motel and coffee shop at the state-border location. In the 1970s, he and son Gary expanded operations to build Whiskey Pete’s. Once called State Line, the area was renamed Primm in 1996 after Ernie’s death.
Anthropic, the company behind the powerful artificial intelligence chatbot Claude, has filed to get ready to list its shares.
The development comes days after it raised $65 billion, valuing it at $965 billion.
The company, founded in 2021 by a breakaway faction from OpenAI, was viewed as an upstart that tailored its chatbots to the needs of businesses and developers, rather than consumers.
Late last year, the release of its agentic coding assistant propelled it ahead in the AI race, as the company’s annualized revenue skyrocketed from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $47 billion in May.
“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors,” the company said in a statement, announcing the confidential filing on its website.
The number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set, the company said. Last week, Anthropic released its latest model, Claude Opus 4.8, to the public.
The upstart began gaining ground against its larger rival OpenAI late last year with the release of its Claude Opus 4.5, which became a huge hit among developers and enthusiasts who were able to merely describe an app or website or online dashboard or research problem in English, and have the coding agent complete the task. .
As adoption of Claude grew, OpenAI has been juggling numerous big bets, including the shuttered text-to-video model Sora, agentic shopping and an AI-native browser, with mounting challenges to monetize its base of 800 million users. The company has since streamlined its operations, focusing on its coding product, Codex, and continues to invest in image generation and robotics.
The announcement puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which reportedly hired bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in the race to go public. Anthropic now eclipses its rival, which was valued at $852 billion in March.
Elon Musk’s xAI, which operates the chatbot Grok, is a part of SpaceX that is gearing up to go public next week. It will be the largest initial public offering of stock in history, and a successful listing will make Musk the first trillionaire.
The blockbuster year for Silicon Valley IPOs will test people’s appetite to invest in the promise of artificial intelligence, amid worries and warnings of an AI bubble. .
Nasdaq introduced a rule change this year, shortening the three-month waiting period for stocks to be included in the index to 15 days.
It was done to accommodate monster listings such as SpaceX. The cooling-off period allows newly listed stocks to stabilize before passive index funds pick them up, but indices said it’s a much-needed update, as companies stay private longer, are more mature and have much larger valuations than in the past.
Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, has been outspoken about the risks of artificial intelligence wiping out half of all entry-level jobs and driving unemployment up by 20%. Some in the Trump administration have criticized his views as alarmist and accused his advocacy of AI safety of being an attempt at regulatory capture to create onerous compliance barriers that would restrict AI development to a handful of large companies, locking out smaller competitors.
In March, the company sued the Pentagon after it was designated as a “supply chain risk” for refusing to allow the use of its AI model for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
The White House softened its posture against Anthropic in May, after the release of its AI model Claude Mythos, which proved itself adept at finding critical software bugs. The incident prompted a U-turn in the Trump administration’s laissez-faire approach to AI regulation and led to the consideration of safety testing before broader public release.
Anthropic’s Mythos model has now become a tool of geopolitical advantage for the U.S., as governments across the globe, including the European Union, have requested access to the powerful tool to identify and patch vulnerabilities in the banking and financial system that could be exposed to hacking.
The explosive demand has increased Anthropic’s need for AI chips, causing previous outages and forcing the company to set usage limits for users. To secure access to vital hardware, the company signed agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom and SpaceX in April for new computing capacity.
Business
Paramount’s Delrahim slams ‘fear-mongering’ and partisan politics clouding Warner Bros. deal
Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison has been circling the globe, meeting government regulators who will ultimately decide the fate of his controversial $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Last week, Ellison spent two hours answering questions from U.S. Justice Department antitrust lawyers in a bid to secure a key government approval — one that few people believe is in doubt because of President Trump’s strong support of tech billionaire Larry Ellison and his son’s ambitions to amass more power.
Throughout his travels, David Ellison has been accompanied by a savvy wingman: Makan Delrahim.
Delrahim, Paramount’s chief legal officer, served as the nation’s top antitrust regulator in the Justice Department during Trump’s first term. The 56-year-old Iranian American, who grew up in Los Angeles, is the architect of shrewd moves that have brought Paramount within reach of its blockbuster merger that would redefine Hollywood.
Politics have permeated the process — even before Trump announced he would get involved. Opponents have been suspicious of the Ellisons, given the family’s ties to Trump and programming changes to redefine Paramount’s CBS, including last month’s departure of late-night comedian Stephen Colbert and a shakeup at “60 Minutes,” CBS’ newsmagazine.
Buying Warner Bros. Discovery would give the Ellisons control of both CBS News and CNN.
Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. has sparked dread in Hollywood for another reason, too: Thousands of jobs already have vanished through a string of media mergers.
More than 5,000 artists and entertainment industry workers have signed an open letter, calling on California Atty. General Rob Bonta to try to block the deal on antitrust grounds.
In an interview with The Times, Delrahim responded to concerns and criticisms. This interview has been edited for length and clarity:
Where does the regulatory process stand?
We are still going through the regulatory approval process. We actually started planning for the regulatory approval filings last summer. We knew we were going to be pursuing this transaction but it took a few months longer to sign the transaction than we thought. There were some interveners [Netflix, Comcast], but we planned ahead.
Do you have a commitment from Trump or his administration that you’ll get a thumbs up?
There are no deals with the president. We have a deal with the Warner Bros. shareholders. We’ve submitted [applications] to the governments of Europe, Canada, U.K. and the U.S., and that’s where it is.
You got a head-start because you filed a regulatory approval in December — months before Paramount had a deal with Warner. Why so soon?
We were always very skeptical [the Netflix deal] would ever go through. The only way to really show the [Warner] board that our deal would get through — because it doesn’t have antitrust problems — was to move as fast as we could.
One of the benefits being a former [DOJ] enforcer and having a team of outside lawyers who are also former colleagues and enforcers was that we anticipated what the government would ask for. Those were questions that we would have asked, and so we provided those answers.
Your timeline is aggressive. Some suggest Paramount wants this deal done before the mid-term elections.
I don’t think it’s aggressive. It has nothing to do with the midterms. The midterms do not change the officials at the Justice Department or the FCC — we have that minor application there. The midterms have no effect on the European Commission or anybody else. We’ve been very transparent and proactive with members of Congress and with the state attorneys general and the federal authorities.
Are you preparing to defend a potential antitrust challenge from Atty. General Bonta?
Well, no matter what field you’re in, whether it’s antitrust or whether you’re preparing for a football game, you always prepare the best you can for the worst, and you hope it never gets there. So, we’re preparing for challenges from anybody and everybody. But I don’t think any serious antitrust enforcer who looks at the facts, the law, the economics of this transaction will see an antitrust violation.
Why are you so confident?
There’s no element of this merger that is anti-competitive. Once you look at it, it’s incredibly pro-competitive. It increases output, it increases jobs, and it lowers the cost to the consumers. If you actually try to block this deal, you’re going to harm consumers, you’re going to harm creative talent, because you’re going to harm the creative ecosystem — the vision that David [Ellison] is trying to deploy here. It’s transformative from the efficiencies that it creates.
David Ellison has promised to release 30 films a year. Was that commitment to show that this merger will not be a repeat of Walt Disney Co.’s 2019 purchase of Fox?
I’m quite familiar with that one because I was at the Justice Department and reviewed it. Disney-Fox was a transaction with a different thesis. Disney wanted to get into streaming and they wanted to get scripted series. It wasn’t about studios trying to increase output.
Our transaction, as David has described, is motivated to create more content to feed the theaters, then streaming. We have a natural economic incentive to create more content. We’ll still be in fourth place after this transaction on the streaming side — almost half the size of Netflix.
David Ellison hasn’t made any commitments on the television side or pledged pledge to keep the various TV studios intact. Why?
I don’t think there’s much of an overlap on the television studios. Look, you have incredible studios in HBO, Warner Bros. Television, certainly our own studio. We’re not paying money to limit supply. It’s the exact opposite.
There is overlap between CBS News and CNN. How are regulators looking at that issue?
We’re very proud of CBS News and hopefully CNN, post-transaction. There is very limited overlap. Why? Because CBS News only airs a few hours a week of programming whereas CNN is 24/7, and it has international reach.
Antitrust regulators are going to see that it’s going to create synergistic effects. You might be able to cross-program and more people will be exposed to the incredible programming of CBS News. They’ll benefit from each other’s independent strengths.
During the first Trump administration, you said merger conditions were problematic because it’s difficult for the government to enforce behavioral remedies. Has your thinking changed?
No, I’ve been quite consistent. If there’s an antitrust problem, you need a divestiture [selling assets]. I don’t think there’s a remedy needed in this transaction. But having said that, we’re happy to engage with regulators to discuss where they see a problem and a possible solution. We’re always wanting to engage in constructive dialogue.
Would Paramount spin off CNN?
I don’t see that. I can’t see any antitrust reason to do so. That would be a weaponization of the antitrust law, and that would not be appropriate.
Many people in Hollywood view the merger with trepidation because of the prospect of more job losses. Others see it through a political lens. How do you evaluate the politics?
Politics is part of life. It’s part of the beautiful process of democracy. Generally, we are very empathetic to the folks in Hollywood, but this transaction will actually create more and better and exciting jobs. David is an absolute lover of films; he’s a filmmaker himself. For the first time, you are getting an owner who comes from the creative side.
Let’s be honest. There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction really because of their own antisemitic views. Regulators and law enforcement officials will see right through that.
Do regulators share others’ concerns about the merger debt — $79 billion — for the combined company?
Some regulators appropriately have asked about it. They say: ‘This is what we have heard, that you guys are not going to be around because of this debt,’ which is just silliness. David and his family are owner-operators. They’re not rented CEOs. They have over 50% ownership. They put their money at stake and my money is on them.
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