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Biomedical (& social) sciences are riddled with fraud: Real scandal behind ivermectin

#1
C C Offline
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ms/620473/

EXCERPT: . . . Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, suggested in July that the scientific community is long past due for a reckoning on the prevalence of false data in the literature. “We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary,” he wrote. This is less hostile than it sounds. Smith isn’t saying that everything is fraudulent, but rather that everything should be evaluated starting from a baseline of “I don’t believe you” until we definitely see otherwise. Think of the airport-security workers who assume that you may be carrying contraband or weapons until you prove that you aren’t. The point is not that everyone is armed but that everybody has to go through the machine.

Yet it has not yet sunk in to the public consciousness that our system for building biomedical knowledge largely ignores any evidence of widespread misconduct. In other words, the literature on ivermectin may be quite bad—and in being so, it may also be quite unremarkable.

If this is the case, how does medical science manage to navigate all the bad research? How have we not returned to the ages of leeches and bloodletting?

The secret, again, is simple: Much research is simply ignored by other scientists because it either looks “off” or is published in the wrong place. A huge gray literature exists in parallel to reliable clinical research, including work published in low-quality or outright predatory journals that will publish almost anything for money. Likewise, the authors of fabricated or heavily distorted papers tend to have modest ambitions: The point is to get their work in print and added to their CV, not to make waves. We often say these studies are designed to be “written but not read.”

Although some of the papers we examined may claim, for instance, that ivermectin is a perfect COVID-19 prophylactic, they do so based on a smallish study of a few hundred people—and the work is published in journals that during pre-pandemic times would have been deeply obscure. When a group claims to have reviewed, say, 100,000 patient records—and then publishes its dubious results in a high-profile journal—the risks are significant.

In a pandemic, when the stakes are highest, the somewhat porous boundary between these publication worlds has all but disappeared. There is no gray literature now: Everything is a magnet for immediate attention and misunderstanding. An unbelievable, inaccurate study no longer has to linger in obscurity; it may bubble over into the public consciousness as soon as it appears online, and get passed around the internet like a lost kitten in a preschool. An instantly forgettable preprint, which would once have been read by only a few pedantic experts, can now be widely shared among hundreds of thousands on social media.

And our work will begin all over again.

The fact that there is no true institutional vigilance around a research literature that affects the health of nations, that it is necessary for us to do this, is obscene. It is a testament to how badly the scientific commons are managed that their products are fact-checked for the first time by a group of weary volunteers. (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Syne Offline
Coming from The Atlantic, I presume this cares less about biomedical integrity and more about subtly slamming those who treat COVID with ivermectin. Even though the same publication is all for anecdotal stories when it comes to their own political agendas, like immigration, gun control, etc..
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