The Pandemic Issue

You can go back and read sociologists of science from 50-60 years ago and see the same thing, but I just don’t think that it’s in the same way that it is now, maybe in part because of social media. I’ve been personally very critical about several studies, but this is the first time I’ve experienced being attacked by trolls and having some nasty websites written about me. It is very disturbing to read. It is. Yet you have been a fearless and vocal critic of some very high-profile papers, like the infamous French study about hydroxychloroquine. Right, the paper that came out was immediately tweeted by the President of the United States. At first I thought it was great that our President tweeted about science! I thought that was a major breakthrough. I took a look at this paper. It had just come out that day, I believe. The first thing I no- ticed is that it was accepted within 24 hours of being sub- mitted to the journal. It was actually published in a journal where one of the authors is the editor-in-chief, which is a huge conflict of interest, but it happens. But in this particular case, there were also a lot of flaws with the study and that, I think, should have been caught during peer review. The paper was first published on a preprint server and then within 24 hours or so it was published in that paper, supposedly after peer review. There were very few changes between the preprint version and the peer review paper. There were just a couple of extra lines, extra sentences added here and there, but it wasn’t really, I think, critically looked at. Because there were a lot of things that I thought were flaws. Just to go over a couple of them. This paper showed suppos- edly that people who were treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin were doing much better by clearing their virus much faster than people who were not treated with these drugs.

Elisabeth:

Ivan:

Elisabeth:

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