A researcher accused of misconduct by a fired colleague was given the all-clear by her institution this week. Nina Bhardwaj (right), a New York University School of Medicine vaccine researcher, co-authored a paper with David O’Neill, who was later dismissed from NYU for “unprofessional behavior.” O’Neill is claiming in a lawsuit that he was fired in retaliation for resisting when Bhardwaj allegedly wanted to “spin” the results of that paper by selecting a more favourable statistical analysis. The paper found that a new ‘dendritic cell’ vaccine, which O’Neill argues Bhardwaj also has a financial stake in, is no better that older, cheap vaccine technology.

We reported on the case in September, using it as an opportunity to look at the power clinical trial statistics have in shaping how research results are perceived. While it is certainly true in general that statistics can be used to make results appear clearer or more favorable to certain outcomes, the NYU investigation highlights something that we also noted in our story: in this case the statistical approaches favored by both parties told the same tale. There may have been subtle differences, and certainly they loomed large to O’Neill in the emails he sent to his co-authors at the time, but the take-home result was the same. It is not as if Bhardwaj was claiming that the dendritic cell vaccines were better.

As the statistician on the paper put it when interviewed by NYU’s Inquiry Committee, “no matter how you look at it,…you can try cut points, you can try paired, you use the continuous data, you use the comprehensive modeling approach, the dendritic cell vaccine is not of any use.”

Thus the NYU committee determined that what O’Neill called misconduct fit squarely in the realm of “difference of opinion,” and there is no evidence that Bhardwaj tried to make things look rosier for the dendritic cell vaccine.

It is unclear what influence this report will have in the lawsuit O’Neill filed. His lawyer, Debra Raskin, declined to comment.

The Inquiry Committee Report is freely available here, and is short and readable. NYU seems to want to shine daylight on this case, since they believe that greater transparency will only lead to greater rehabilitation for Dr. Bhardwaj’s reputation. And to that end, they’ve taken the additional step of sending the report out to news outlets, like Nature, that reported on the case. It makes a striking contrast to the results of the investigation of Homme Hellinga at Duke, which was kept secret—up to and including their conclusion.