Quote:
Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange
The big one that I recall (which I expect few others noticed) was the study published in The Lancet back in May of 2020 ("Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis"). The study looked at HCQ as a treatment for COVID and came down against it.
However, a few sharp-eyed people on Twitter noticed something odd with the data. They dug into it and soon found there was no way the data could be what was presented. Indeed, it turned out the data appeared to be entirely fraudulent. The study was retracted by The Lancet less than two weeks after it had been published.
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The retraction of that particular study looms large for only some people who, for whatever reason, wanted hydroxychloroquine to work for COVID.
And, so far as I can tell, it wasn't "sharp-eyed people on Twitter" that lead to the demise of that article but "over 100 scientists from across the world flagged discrepancies in the research in an open letter to the journal's editor."
https://www.deccanchronicle.com/scie...retracted.html
The scientific community cleaned up this mess quickly. And, of course, later studies confirmed that hydroxychloroquine is worthless for treating COVID.
Yes, one needs to be very cautious in accepting any particular study. But it is the media that plays up individual studies. But using the media's occasional misuse of studies to question all peer-reviewed studies seems like a bad idea. Science is a
process where things are claimed, published, challenged, attacked, revised, and sometimes rejected. Outright fraud is very rare. Real-world science is messy, but in the end the knowledge generated by science is often superior to many other types of knowledge.