The Pandemic Claims New Victims: Prestigious Medical Journals (nytimes.com) 76
One study promised that popular blood-pressure drugs were safe for people infected with the coronavirus. Another paper warned that anti-malaria drugs endorsed by President Trump actually were dangerous to these patients. The studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, were retracted shortly after publication, following an outcry from researchers who saw obvious flaws. From a report: The hasty retractions, on the same day this month, have alarmed scientists worldwide who fear that the rush for research on the coronavirus has overwhelmed the peer review process and opened the door to fraud, threatening the credibility of respected medical journals just when they are needed most. Peer review is supposed to safeguard the quality of scientific research. When a journal receives a manuscript, the editors ask three or more experts in the field for comments. The reviewers' written assessments may force revisions in a paper or prompt the journal to reject the work altogether. The system, widely adopted by medical journals in the middle of the 20th century, undergirds scientific discourse around the world. "The problem with trust is that it's too easy to lose and too hard to get back," said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, which published one of the retracted papers in early May. "These are big blunders." If outside scientists detected problems that weren't identified by the peer reviewers, then the journals failed, he said. Like hundreds of other researchers, Dr. Kassirer called on the editors to publish full explanations of what happened.
It's a time for rough drafts (Score:2)
You can't make approval a Boolean value when you are in a hurry. We need to get preliminary results out quick. Just make sure they are marked "preliminary".
Re: It's a time for rough drafts (Score:5, Insightful)
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The sad thing is that people think this is something new for some reason. It's not, has never been and science has been at the mercy of politics since the very first establishment of an authority.
Humans will game every systems we are involved with... that is what we do! The current riots are a perfect example of this how fast facts and ideas are thrown away the moment you have something you can use to grasp onto power! There is no subject not influenced by the problem of human corruption and interference
Re: It's a time for rough drafts (Score:2)
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It's beyond that. Research has been sloppy, facts have been twisted for political gains, and I find that I can no longer trust any scientific articles from media sources unless I cross reference and triangulate. I actually found it unbelievable that mainstream media was using pre-print research papers to write fake "factual" articles. Lots of black eyes to go around...
This is clearly one of those "never attribute to malice what can better be explained by incompetence" type of things. Popular media sources have always been very poor at translating scientific articles for the public. Here on /. we've been seeing media sources botch scientific information for decades.
Very few people have the time to actually comb through the research, so the best thing is to just be a more discerning consumer of news. I find that the writes at Ars Technica, for example, tend to do a really
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It's a multi-faceted problem, one of which, and I wish I could find the actual quote, but someone said something to the effect of; 'whenever I know about the topic, the media coverage is always wrong, but whenever I know nothing, I believe the media coverage as the truth'. I once met a science editor for an Australian newspaper, and he was asked the very question about how much he understands the content he's covering. He being a person with absolutely no scientific education, he admitted that he understand
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'whenever I know about the topic, the media coverage is always wrong, but whenever I know nothing, I believe the media coverage as the truth'.
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect, coined by Michael Crichton. His Speech on it is as follows:
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
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I totally agree with your post. However, I think there are many readers who have the education to be more discerning than they are and are just lazy. I was annoyed that the parent poster concluded that it was better to dismiss the media as a whole—and apparently any scientific article he doesn't have time to vet himself—rather than become a more discerning consumer. Perhaps I was giving him too much credit by assuming that he should have the ability to have a more nuanced view of the media rathe
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It's beyond that. Research has been sloppy, facts have been twisted for political gains, and I find that I can no longer trust any scientific articles from media sources unless I cross reference and triangulate.
Disregarding the accusation of intention, this is a serious worry and the point of the article.
I actually found it unbelievable that mainstream media was using pre-print research papers to write fake "factual" articles. Lots of black eyes to go around...
I find it unbelievable that you find it unbelievable. The popular press has always behaved like this and before the internet it was much worse, nowadays it's resonably simple to see if it's been published in a reputable scientific journal and I've always found that you can read at least the abstract for free.
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The American Medical Association can introduce a rating system for such draft research in terms of verification and fallow-up levels.
Also, the Executive Branch should announce that any fraudulent activity in such research will be prosecuted swiftly and thoroughly to discourage riff-raff. This would include pressuring foreign governments to do the same, since we rely on international work. (Unfortunately, the EB has been part of the riff-raff.)
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I don't even believe the abstracts anymore.
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We are plagued by official secrecy and lies (Score:3, Insightful)
Who are you going to trust?
Re:We are plagued by official secrecy and lies (Score:4, Insightful)
Journalists are united in telling you to trust journalists. It's such constant propaganda few think even to question it. We read something we know about first hand, see that every single detail is wrong, turn the page, and go on believing the next thing.
Re:We are plagued by official secrecy and lies (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just a few "bad apples". There are a lot of journalists that don't grasp the concepts they are reporting on. There is also a big culture of sensationalism.
However, if the industry is going to withstand the current political onslaught, it really needs to up it's game.
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Journalism is a for-profit business and when your competitors all play by the same rules you do, there can be journalistic integrity. When your competitor is Fox "News", then the rules have changed.
The state of journalism is not messed up, the state of journalism is being dragged down by bad actors and is under assault by a criminal president.
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People, including many scientists, don't understand what journals do. They publish reports of research. Peer review is intended to make sure it's not complete shite, and that enough detail is included so that it's useful to other scientists. Individual papers aren't supposed to be "true." You're not even supposed to make any claims beyond "this is what we saw."
No single experiment is ever definitive. The vaunted historical experimental successes we hear about are extremely simplified versions of what really
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Are you jealous?
Don't confuse Fox with journalism.
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No, you can take your strawman home. Journalists will tell you to check their sources and read their whole article and cross-check with other publications with independent sources for really important things. You are just trying to create confusion to make the yellow journalistic sources that you want to push falsely equivalent to quality journalism.
The case under discussion here is an example of a common misunderstanding of the peer review process. Intentional fraud is often NOT caught at the peer rev
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Current BLM narrative is likely going to be the next massive black eye for journalist crowd. Every single major claim of BLM that has been repeated ad nauseam ever since riots started is factually false. US in 2019 was at the lowest point of police killing civilians in ages. In many places, ever. Black cops kill black people far more than white cops. So do latino cops. Cops kill white people more than black people when number of criminality per demographic (i.e. reason to interact with police) is taken into
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Current BLM narrative is likely going to be the next massive black eye for journalist crowd.
Why? Do you think some journalist is going to break ranks and call out the lies of all the other journalists? Seems unlikely. The narrative will continue unchallenged by facts. Heck, "fact checkers" will be found to make all those claims true and the actual truth will be marked as disputed by FB and YT with links to the "fact checkers".
Ministry of Truth in all but name.
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"Snoped" has become a mark twisting the facts to serve a narrative same way as "fake news" became a mark of lying in media. Things get out eventually. Not among the most fanatical of the believers, but the rest of the people just get exhausted by being treated as if they're all utterly stupid and stop caring about the BS.
Medical Profession Took Major Credibility Hit (Score:3, Insightful)
Click here [slashdot.org] and check out several comments about how Fauci should stick to the medical arena, and not let politics intrude on his analysis or recommendations.
https://twitter.com/PrisonPlan... [twitter.com]
What then, to make of an open letter signed by over a thousand health officials in which they explicitly cite
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We just saw a blatant, much bigger demonstration and admission of politics infecting the medical profession, and (in further demonstration of bias) almost no one is calling it out (including slashdot).
Click here [slashdot.org] and check out several comments about how Fauci should stick to the medical arena, and not let politics intrude on his analysis or recommendations.
https://twitter.com/PrisonPlan... [twitter.com]
What then, to make of an open letter signed by over a thousand health officials in which they explicitly cite their personal politics, including how it overrides their professional judgedment?
I don't get what you're trying to say here. It seems like you're claiming the medical profession isn't credible based on some slashdot comments I need to find myself and Tucker Carson, that's really an uphill battle. If you could summarize the argument it would be helpful.
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Trust no-one.
Think for yourself, and keep thinking.
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Yeah, well, we need accurate data
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No, you want accurate data, and you believe that trusting somebody will cause you to possess it.
But it won't. It will just make you more certain of your presumptions.
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Weird that you would say that, seeing as that I never implied such a thing.
We need accurate data because we need accurate data. Somebody may be providing it, but we, including you, don't know who.
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Then loss of prestige won't even touch your data.
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"prestige" has nothing to do with the price of rice. You're off on some weird tangent there
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Yeah, that works real well in all cases. I know I certainly reproduce all medical studies before I take anything my doctor gives me. Double blind, the whole bit. I'm almost ready to take that medication I was given six years ago for paranoia in fact.
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So those are the only options you've heard of; to be credulous, or to research everything yourself starting from the stone age?
Wow. I heard of other things, but if you're that far behind, I doubt we could discuss them successfully.
Well I supposed its just another thing to add to (Score:2)
... the growing list of things about this pandemic and dealing with it that "just don't make sense".
The Lancet (Score:3)
The "obvious flaws" in this case were that hardly any of the hospitals which had "contributed their data" to the study had ever heard of Surgisphere, the company who concocted it.
The reason this was not detected immediately was that the side effects of hydroxychloroquine are well known so the purported results of the study actually made sense. How was the fraud detected? The numbers for Australia did not make sense, Surgisphere claimed some South Asian hospitals had erroneously been attributed to Australia but by then people were talking to the hospitals and the whole thing unravelled.
You need to look at the achievements of the founder of Surgisphere - they are beyond awesome, Leonardo da Vince has nothing on him. According to him.
Oh, the site is suspended. Oh well.
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Never too early to blame Trump! (Score:4, Insightful)
No piece of writing, that mocks or otherwise portrays Trump — or, indeed, any active Republican politician — in bad light, can be wrong.
What "credibility"? Lancet has earlier accused the US [wikipedia.org] of causing over 600K civilian casualties in Iraq, for example — because, in order to damage Bush, they included "estimated" additional deaths from lawlessness, damaged infrastructure, and diminished healthcare.
More recently, Lancet are saying "It’s unfair to blame China for coronavirus" [scmp.com] — although attacking Trump is glorious [washingtonpost.com].
"Credibility" my tail...
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No piece of writing, that mocks or otherwise portrays Trump — or, indeed, any active Republican politician — in bad light, can be wrong.
What "credibility"? Lancet has earlier accused the US [wikipedia.org] of causing over 600K civilian casualties in Iraq, for example — because, in order to damage Bush, they included "estimated" additional deaths from lawlessness, damaged infrastructure, and diminished healthcare.
More recently, Lancet are saying "It’s unfair to blame China for coronavirus" [scmp.com] — although attacking Trump is glorious [washingtonpost.com].
"Credibility" my tail...
It has gotten to the point where I don't know who to believe about anything
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As though it were hard to tell. Not sure of you are serious or you are part of the noise machine.
The goal of the constant gaslighting by the president, his supporters and the many bad actors involved is precisely to achieve this result.
You want to know who to believe? First, learn who Trump was long before politics was involved. He was a pathological liar, con man and cheat. That has never been in question. Why would you think that, somehow, any of that has changed? It is not at all hard to follow.
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As though it were hard to tell. Not sure of you are serious or you are part of the noise machine.
The goal of the constant gaslighting by the president, his supporters and the many bad actors involved is precisely to achieve this result.
You want to know who to believe? First, learn who Trump was long before politics was involved. He was a pathological liar, con man and cheat. That has never been in question. Why would you think that, somehow, any of that has changed? It is not at all hard to follow.
Yup, Orange Man Bad. It's all his fault that what used to be news organizations are now just click bait generators. They no longer report the news, they make the news. And if they accidentally publish something objective the complaints roll in and somebody's head will roll.
Check out this article from Matt Taibi "The American Press is Destroying Itself":
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/... [substack.com]
Re:Never too early to blame Trump! (Score:4, Insightful)
No piece of writing, that mocks or otherwise portrays Trump — or, indeed, any active Republican politician — in bad light, can be wrong.
It was retracted. How it was published in the first place is the point of the story.
What "credibility"? Lancet has earlier accused the US [wikipedia.org] of causing over 600K civilian casualties in Iraq, for example — because, in order to damage Bush, they included "estimated" additional deaths from lawlessness, damaged infrastructure, and diminished healthcare.
Even if the intention was to damage Bush, as long as the methodology was presented and the original data made available to other scientists I don't see the problem.
More recently, Lancet are saying "It’s unfair to blame China for coronavirus" [scmp.com] — although attacking Trump is glorious [washingtonpost.com].
"Credibility" my tail...
That's an editor in an interview and a comment on a editorial. Editorials are opinion pieces.
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The methodology hasn't been used to calculate casualties of other conflicts, and the very term "casualty" [princeton.edu] (in context of a war) is normally taken to mean "someone injured or killed or captured or missing in a military engagement".
By substituting the meaning with something else — to an obvious political end — the, supposedly, "scientific" journal diminished its credibility. Just as I said.
Which st
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The methodology hasn't been used to calculate casualties of other conflicts, and the very term "casualty" [princeton.edu] (in context of a war) is normally taken to mean "someone injured or killed or captured or missing in a military engagement".
By substituting the meaning with something else — to an obvious political end — the, supposedly, "scientific" journal diminished its credibility. Just as I said.
Which still reflects on the publication's credibility. Just as I said.
How can calculating the casualties of other conflicts be the responsibility of those particular researchers or the Lancet (I'm just assuming you're not against the publication of original research)? Casualty does not have a narrow scientific meaning so in a scientific paper it needs a definition, especially if you intend to use a wider meaning than commonly used. From the presentation of the methodology you can safely draw the conclusion very precisely that whatever is found by the method is what is include
Re: Never too early to blame Trump! (Score:2)
Now you've drifted so far from what's resonable it's a good idea to go back to the original question concerning the original lancet articles: http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/... [loc.gov] https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org] See the headline, see the method. It's not even close to your original claim.
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Ah, very good, so they are online. Now, can you find a similar study covering the events after 1990-92 hostilities in the same country? Or of deaths in Kuwait followed Iraq's own invasion there? Or any other armed conflict?
You cannot, they never dabbled in the subject before the opportunity to attack Bush arose. The results were so bombastic, it was [theguardian.com] and remains "controversial" [theconversation.com] even in the Liberal-leaning circles.
Not only was it inaccurate, the whole p
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"Even if the intention was to damage Bush, as long as the methodology was presented and the original data made available to other scientists I don't see the problem."
Example:
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/0... [nytimes.com]
"The question is, should this indictment have ever been brought? Which office do I go to to get my reputation back? Who will reimburse my company for the economic jail it has been in for two and a half years?''
Once a lie is out in the wild -- there's no real economic advantage for those who CAUSED the li
Re: Never too early to blame Trump! (Score:2)
In the Lancet case they passed the test of the scientific method, in your linked case they didn't pass the test of a jury trial. In the Lancet case, if it hadn't passed the "test", no one would have known because it wouldn't have been published. That's the difference between the cases and why in some jurisdictions frivolous civil cases are punishable (this wasn't civil so it would be handled like an employer issue but you get the gist), while submissions of frivolous scientific papers to journals afaik isn'
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Love how you make that first statement then talk about credibility.
BTW, attacking Trump IS glorious. How do we know? Because the source is The Washington Post...and you here. That's the value of credibility, and lack thereof.
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You missed the one where the Lancet went to basically start the whole antivaxxer movement because of a paper published in cahoots with a lawyer seeking to fraudulently make some money suing drug companies.
Really its scientific models not the journals ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The public is basically learning that
(1) scientific modeling can have an awful lot of guesswork and assumption, ie a weak model.
(2) scientific modeling, even with a strong model, is subject to garbage in garbage out.
(3) politics can elevate weak scientific models and garbage input, or suppress strong scientific model and good input.
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The biggest problem is not so much the models as much as the messenger. Take for instance the imperial college model which was the basis for the shutdowns around the world. The media in the USA, I won't name names, suffice to say it was Trump's favourite network loves pointing out that the imperial college model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the USA. They weren't alone, a few other news outlets reported that factoid.
Oh except they left out the word "unmitigated" a simple adjective which completely changes
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Your right about all of that. One thing that has to change as a result of all of this is lack of control on the models themselves. There were no controls to prevent the models from being manipulated for political purposes. This is a critical failing and not simply an academic failing.
Hearings need to be held in congress with regards to this and people need to be held accountable. There was a single result that I am aware that was accurate within even an order of magnitude. Either all of the models were junk
What new victims? The readers? (Score:1)
the process never really worked (Score:2)
The process was broken long before this. On the receiving end we regularly got comments demanding we cite only vaguely related papers, with language strongly suggesting the reviewers (albeit anonymous) were pushing their own work. On the sending end you could go through and discredit the very core of the paper, showing the work was neither novel or useful, in one case they literally took existing mod
"It's an ill wind that blows no good" (Score:2)
The challenge of a terrifying disease is turning out to have a long-term effect that is going to be highly beneficial: we have been forced to prod the glacial process of medical research and validation into some semblance of 21st-century speed. Like the old French monarchy it resembled, the cartelized, hidebound, politicized, misregulated mess that medicine has turned into will being replaced by something that is going to look more like software development in Silicon Valley. Peer reviewers should be able t
Why is anyone surprised? (Score:2)
It's pretty well known that a lot of published research is wrong and the error rate is greater in high impact journals and for hot topics.
My last paper took four revisions over about a year and a half before it was published. My record is more like four years. Anything written on COVID-19 is going to be a rush job from the researchers, and carry with it a huge amount of pressure for editors and reviewers to approve it.
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The diversity of opinions on Slashdot never ceases to amaze. Fortunately the world has a good supply of aluminum foil.
Damage is already done (Score:4, Informative)
The damage was already done. Academic journals never should have succumbed to the political pressure to begin with. They've lost credibility with a lot of the public, and arguably with good cause. There's a database with 18,000 retracted academic articles and that doesn't count the ones that should be retracted and haven't been.
https://science.howstuffworks.... [howstuffworks.com]
That big study that said that hydroxychloroquine that put the media into a frenzy a few weeks ago because it could kill you? Turns out it relied on data from a single person at a single company. That single person has no medical qualifications and previously worked as a science fiction author.
The medical professional who actually reviewed the data quickly determined that the data was fabricated. The Lancet and NEJM had to retract their articles after failing to perform proper peer review. The errors were found by a medical professional in Asia who was trying to figure out why his success was different than the errors in the study.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/... [statnews.com]
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/n... [japantimes.co.jp]
The WHO immediately resumed their study of the drug. How many people died that could have been saved because a science fiction author pulled a political stunt and nobody bothered to perform basic freshman level peer review?
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Not that many, according to an Oxford study. https://popular.info/p/the-gam... [popular.info]
Victims of Speed in the era of COVID-19 (Score:1)
Paywall (Score:2)
The provided link is pay-walled. Here's [retractionwatch.com] a list of COVID papers that have been retracted. I'm not sure which two we're meant to be concerned about, but I think it's this one [thelancet.com] and this one. [nejm.org]
Retraction watch outlines the details around each retraction here [retractionwatch.com] and here [retractionwatch.com].
The Guardian has an article [theguardian.com] that doesn't appear to be blocked by a paywall.
Precedence (Score:3)
Overwhelmed? (Score:2)
They knowingly lied for petty political reasons.