#Science has an ugly, complicated dark side and the #Coronavirus is bringing it out.
#Retractions aside, the situation raises broad concerns about the rigor of published research itself. “What [the pandemic] has done is just made everyone rush to publication and rush to judgment, frankly,” says Oransky, a non-practicing medical doctor who is also the vice president of editorial at medical news and reference site Medscape and teaches medical journalism at New York University. “You’re seeing papers published in the world’s leading medical journals that probably shouldn’t have even been accepted in the world’s worst medical journals.”
Earlier this month, for instance, the New England Journal of Medicine published a 61-person study for an antiviral therapy called remdesivir to treat COVID-19. Of the 53 patients whose data could be analyzed, 36 saw improvement after 10 days of treatment. There was no control group, and Gilead Sciences, the company that developed remdesivir, funded and conducted the study and helped write the first draft of the manuscript. The study was by no means fraudulent, but it presented a clear conflict of interest. “I think it’s a good thing that it’s all out there and people are able to look at it,” Oransky says, “but it’s so inconsistent with what the New England Journal of Medicine claims that it’s always about.”
▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/coronavirus-science-rush-to-publish-retractions