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Comment by fabian2k | Hacker News Reader

Just to clarify, the article in question is not a scientific paper in BMJ. It's a feature, so pretty much like a regular news article.

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On the article in question:

> Footnotes

> Provenance and peer review: commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

While it is an article, it has (in theory) been peer reviewed.

Compare that to this article:

> Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally reviewed.

Interesting, but really hard to interpret what that means in this case. Peer review is for scientific content, and there is no science in this article. It's investigative reporting, so this would require an entirely different kind of review, and probably not one by scientists.

Nothing prevents to peer review an investigative article. Clinical trials are complicated and reviewers were probably professionals who have at least some experience in clinical trials.

Clinical trials are all about science. Everything is important, including data collection.

For scientific papers I have a reasonably good idea what a competent reviewer would do. It's a lot less than what many non-scientists seem to think when they read "peer review", you can't rely entirely on it but it's a useful indicator.

Investigative reporting on how a clinical trial was performed requires a different skill set and also a very different attitude.

In any case, the point of the article to raise a concern, not prove something. FDA is responsible for overseeing this. So far, it appears that were some irregularities with Ventavia and now they might be resolved.

The article never said that this invalidated all Pfizer trial data or anything. But concern was justified and the article was needed to ensure better oversight.

> pretty much like a regular news article.

...but not a "news blog", as claimed by Lead Stories.

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