Natural News provided the link to article from Nature.
Then perhaps you should have given that link instead of one to Natural News. I Googled it, found the Wiki article describing the site, and never opened your link. When you later mentioned that it CONTAINED a link from Nature rather than that it WAS a link from nature, I looked at the Nature article. It was a retrospective study.
"The primary difference between a
retrospective cohort study and a prospective cohort study is the
timing of the
data collection and the direction of the study. A retrospective cohort study looks back in time. It uses preexisting
secondary research data to examine the relationship between an exposure and an outcome. Data is collected
after the outcome you’re studying has already occurred. Alternatively, a
prospective cohort study follows a group of individuals over time. It collects data on both the exposure and the outcome of interest as they are occurring. Data is collected
before the outcome of interest has occurred."
When I was a medical student and young doctor, we were taught that all postmenopausal women for whom it was not contraindicated should be placed on supplemental estrogen replacement therapy. Then, about mid-career medicine reversed itself on this. Only those within two years of menopause should get estrogens, the rest doing worse if given estrogens. Why?
The original recommendations came from "observational studies," which are retrospective. One goes through the charts of patients. Then, prospective, randomized, controlled trials (named below) were done, and showed a different outcome. From
Estrogen, hormonal replacement therapy and cardiovascular disease :
"Observational studies also show that postmenopausal women who receive hormone replacement therapy (HRT) have a lower rate of CVD and cardiac death than those not receiving HRT [
5,
6]. However, two randomized prospective primary or secondary prevention trials, the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) [
7] and the Heart and Estrogen/Progestin Replacement Study (HERS I and II) [
8,
9], showed that HRT may actually increase the risk and events of CVD in postmenopausal women. The reasons for this paradoxical characterization of HRT as both beneficial and detrimental remain unclear. Many potential factors may contribute to the adverse outcome, among them the age of patients, preexisting CVD and/or risk, when HRT was initiated, the type of HRT given (conjugated equine estrogen with progestin), dosage, and the thromboembolic properties of estrogen and progestin [
6,
10–
13]."
Another hypothesis for this anomalous outcome was that healthy women with extensive medical charts weren't the same as women who didn't see doctors regularly in terms of their overall health. The ones getting estrogen were also having their blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol levels monitored and controlled where appropriate, which could have accounted for their better health outcomes than the women not seeing doctors regularly.
Whatever the answer, this is a cautionary tale about retrospective studies like the eye clot study in Nature.
Notice that the data showing the protective effect of vaccines for serious illness and death is also retrospective. It's data collected after the fact regarding vaccination or not status and severe outcomes or not. That means that the two cohorts aren't randomized, and therefore, not similar enough. The unvaccinated ones have a lot more in common with one another than being unvaccinated as do the vaccinated group.
The vaccine deniers were also slower to seek help once they got sick (they were often afraid of going to hospitals), were using pseudoscientific remedies like horse dewormer, and can assumed to be prone to conspiracy theory - all of which may have contributed to the disparity between the outcomes for the two groups. That's why randomization and prospective, double-blinded studies produce more reliable results. The vaccinated and unvaccinated groups would be as similar as possible due to isolation of one variable from the rest - presence or absence of a vaccine.
Why should anyone care what Wiki has to say about it?
I do.
What I don't care about are creationist sites, conservative indoctrination sites, conspiracy theory sites, and pseudoscience sites. I don't look at any of those.
And Wiki's was not the only scathing review of this site:
Anatomy of a Disinformation Empire: Investigating NaturalNews
Natural News articles analyzed - Health Feedback
Popular anti-science site likens journalists to "Nazi collaborators" over GMO coverage