Coronavirus Tests Science’s Need for Speed Limits - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/science/coronavirus-disinformation.html
But the mess he was seeing on Twitter suggested a downside of the service provided by the site, known as a preprint server, during the emerging coronavirus pandemic. The social media platform was awash with conspiracy theories positing that the new coronavirus had been engineered by the Chinese government for population control. And the theorists’ latest evidence was a freshly submitted paper on bioRxiv from a team of Indian researchers that suggested an “uncanny similarity” between proteins in H.I.V. and the new virus.
Traditionally, the Indian researchers would have submitted a paper to a peer-reviewed journal, and their manuscript would be scrutinized by other scientists. But that process takes months, if not more than a year. BioRxiv, medRxiv — another site co-founded by Dr. Inglis — and other preprint servers function as temporary homes that freely disseminate new findings. For scientists on the front lines of the coronavirus response, early glimpses at others’ research helps with study of the virus. But there is a growing audience for these papers that are not yet fully baked, and those readers may not understand the studies’ limitations.
“Science is a conversation,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, a physician and co-founder of Retraction Watch, a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers. “Unfortunately people in times of crisis forget that science is a proposition and a conversation and an argument. I know everybody’s desperate for absolute truth, but any scientist will say that’s not what we’re dealing with.”
Science’s first draft
In November 2013, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories — a 130-year-old research institution — launched bioRxiv. Inspired in part by arXiv, a preprint server focusing on the physical sciences that started in 1991, Dr. Inglis and Richard Sever, a colleague at Cold Spring, hoped that the rapid dissemination of new biological research findings could help other researchers around the world validate or use that data. Interest in bioRxiv then drove the launch of medRxiv, which focuses on health sciences, in July 2019.
Faced with the public misuse of the Indian team’s findings, Dr. Inglis and Dr. Sever decided to add a more prominent notice to readers than was already on the site for those who might not be familiar with preprints.
Now, a yellow banner on every manuscript at bioRxiv warns readers that coronavirus papers on the site are “preliminary reports that have not been peer-reviewed. They should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or be reported in news media as established information.”
Such problems are not confined to preprint servers. Peer-reviewed journals are also receiving a greater volume of submissions about the novel coronavirus, and reviewers are working through them at a breakneck pace. “All the top journals have gotten lightning fast,” Dr. Topol said.
While some of these peer-reviewed findings have helped other scientists, others have been exaggerated on social media and by traditional news outlets. One example was a study about the potential of combining anti-malarial and antibiotic drugs to treat Covid-19. President Trump touted it as “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” The paper’s publisher is now investigating its findings. To date, there is no conclusive data that suggests these drugs work.