Researchers at a consortium of population health institutes announced this week that the association between Covid-19 vaccination and miscarriage remains, on the 3,000th consecutive attempt to locate it, absent. The finding replicates the previous 2,999 findings to within a rounding error, a result the consortium described in its abstract as "structurally settled" and, in the discussion section, as "tiring."1
Having exhausted the available pregnancy registries, participating epidemiologists have reportedly begun re-analysing existing cohorts backwards, sideways, and in a different font, on the theory that someone somewhere may find one of these compelling. The consortium has also commissioned a laminated Certificate of Settlement, which it intends to mail, unsolicited, to anyone who says otherwise on a microphone.
"We have now answered this question more times than it has been asked in good faith," said Dr. Halvard Bysse, the consortium's director of terminal replication. "At current rates the confirmations will outnumber the underlying human pregnancies by 2041. We are, methodologically speaking, out of things to do."
The team notes that producing each confirmation requires roughly 400,000 patient records, four peer reviewers and eight years, whereas generating the opposing claim requires a chair. This finding is, statistically speaking, unremarkable and yet.
1. The committee's proposed new journal category, "Yes, Still," was rejected by publishers on the grounds that it would be indexed under Humour.
