I can write a whole paper about how the vaccine turns your skin magnetic and upload it to medRxiv, but that doesn't mean much.
Many of the most worrying news stories about the vaccines have been either disproven or taken out of proportion because of early drafts like these. We'll have to be patient for a bit longer before we can draw any conclusions from this paper.
As their homepage says:
> Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
>I can write a whole paper about how the vaccine turns your skin magnetic and upload it to medRxiv, but that doesn't mean much.
Yes you could, and, provided you wrote it in such a way that people didn't think it was a joke, you would get published in Nature for sure. Only later when people try to reproduce your work would they realize you are a fraud, and depending on what country you work in, different disciplinary action might be taken (though probably not).
Do you believe peer review suffers from both false positives and false negatives (type I and II errors, don't remember which is which)?
As a side note, we need better terminology than type I and II or false positive/negative. Type I and II is completely opaque to meaning. False positive and negative is unclear because sometimes the negative is desirable and othertimes the positive is desirable.
Maybe RDO and AUO: rejected desirable option and accepted undesirable option.