Infamous paper that popularized unproven Covid-19 treatment retracted
science.org
science.org
This retraction is better than nothing, but it's about four and a half years too late.
Bad papers usually aren't retracted. More often, they're forgotten. And that usually works out well enough. Retractions are needed only when a paper has enough attention that it isn't sufficiently forgotten.
So it's very common for a retraction to take a long time. It takes a while even to notice that a retraction is needed, and then you make quintuple-certain that the call for retraction is correct.
The biggest way that I think the reputation of the science community is being harmed is that it's not holding true to it's own tenets. The only way to discredit a paper is to falsify it's claims. Not to call it "irresponsible" or "immoral", label it "disinformation" or "pants-on--fire".
Bad science gets proved wrong, but nobody is interested in reproducing results. As a result our journals are full of accepted papers documenting unreproducible crap. They have been for a long time. When COVID hit and we needed science to be clean and authoritive, it was already in disarray. Unable to tell us what actually worked, we just got a bunch of folklore from all sides some of which got "blessed" by the high priests and some which was "sacrilegious", but very little of it was backed up with any data beyond modelling (which is just predictions).
Nobody should be claiming the high ground w.r.t. COVID IMHO. The science community failed us by acting in response to politics and not science.
The issue with the paper in question is stuff like:
>six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor.
So you can point out their research is crap without actually falsifying the claim that hydroxychloroquine helps with covid. It's hard to prove a negative experimentally but easy to show stuff like the above is iffy.
It should not be possible for people to promote snake oil treatments without bearing any responsibility. Unfortunately, our timeline puts the responsibility onto the general public and the quality of scientific education means that a sizeable proportion simply don't have the tools to understand publications/retractions etc.
Even if it did, it may not be helpful (at least for the general public):
I am not a scientist but it of 32 faulty widgets, 28 widgets are made by a guy called Raoult, then even blue collar workers know Raoult is an idiot with no business making widgets. If that does not happen, ACME Widgets will eventually go out of business.
This is how science gets discredited - by allowing idiots do “science”. Here Raoult does not get kicked out, but is Director of the ACME - this is how entire field of medicine research gor tainted.
Not really - science has to be open to all as otherwise we risk having a "priesthood" of scientists. What we need are better systems to deal with rogue researchers and retracted papers.
The scientific principle is fine, it's just our implementation that is lacking.
The Wakefield paper linking autism to vaccines has become so mainstream in certain communities it's impossible to undo the damage even though it was (finally) retracted in 2010 and Wakefield himself was struck off the register. At this point only through a very long, slow and arduous process can you get this idea out of people's heads, thanks to constant repetition, reinterpretation, scaremongering, and a whole community forming. It's going to be the same with this paper and the idea that dewormer is effective against the 'rona, or any quack 'rona countermeasures for that matter.
For the progress of science everyone should be able to share their results so that others can try to reproduce them.
This IS the real question: whether it's reproducible or not. By adding more barriers to publishing (like stricter peer reviews) you're not actually getting closer to the answer. The opposite can be true because there's a chance of censoring reproducible results that don't fit the current consensus.
I would be surprised if anyone could do it.
Didier Raoult is on a whole other level. He refuses to admit any issues with the study. He has been under criminal investigation for this. This isn't the first time this has been a big deal (scroll through here to see the issues he's had for the last few years https://retractionwatch.com/?s=Didier+Raoult).
This is also why people increasingly believe whatever they want. Nobody is honest, everything is framed in the most exaggerated ways - which then makes it easy to undermine, and there's mass corruption everywhere on top of all of this especially in covid related stuff where you have geopolitics, politics, and hundreds of billions of dollars in profiteering stewing in one giant, and quite toxic, pot.
science changed the game by insisting that it is not what we believe, but whats out there. But, it doesnt come naturally to most of us. we still love narratives, and are easily fooled.
I wonder what the causality is behind so many people ending up with this same conceptualization within their minds. It has an eerie resemblance to the behavior of people in other ideological groups, like religion.
you are better off believing in newton's theories. it will help you build tools to navigate the world better and weapons to protect you.
One interesting aspect of science is that so much of what's true within it requires no proof, like religion. A lot of people try to get around this by saying that people aren't a part of science, but then they always seem to lose track of the thread when asked how science accomplishes anything without having either people involved, or the supernatural (which "doesn't exist" dontcha know).
It is purely a human endeavor much like other arts we pursue - except in this art, we settle opinion/belief with a specific method. For a belief to be inducted into science, it has to endure rigorous tests.
Cs peirce attempted a proof here: https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
At an individual level, I suspect, we fear the uncertainty that comes with the “irritation of doubt” and we also fear being a social outcaste. Therefore to optimize happiness we would rather stick with the beliefs of our tribe - however unscientific they may be - because they serve as a mental anchor. Hence the prevalence of religions and beliefs that are tribal.
It's not science that really changed anything but rather humanity freeing itself from bias and opening itself to having a discourse and debate on practically any issue, without consequence - accepting all the discomfort that that entails.
But such eras are brief and can fade rapidly. The Islamic world was once a global leader in the sciences. Algebra = al jabr, Arabic numerals, alongside countless contributions to astronomy and other fields. Oh but how fast that candle of learning can be snuffed out when it becomes inconvenient.
Hum...
There's something very wrong with a figure like that.
It should be noted that a few months after Raoult's paper was published another one contradicting his was
* https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926
It's just the contradiction may not have been as widely known, especially by those that aren't involved in the field.
Isn't this how science is (at least partly) done? Claim (which is falsifiable) and counter-claim (verification/repudiation).
Anyone can "do science". No permission is required. The question is who publishes what garbage.
there are two kinds of people. the majority of us have made up our minds and find evidence for it. the rare few listen to whats out there with an open mind. once someone has put their name on something, they fight hard to protect that.
entire populations have always been and still are driven by pseudo-science (astrology etc).
It's maddening. I mean don't get me wrong, I don't read scientific papers at all because I'm not smart enough and don't have the attention span but I can criticise those that say they do and believe in science nevertheless.
At the end of the day I think it's about in-group signalling more than anything else, and certainly wishful thinking more than evidence, but the cognitive dissonance is still shocking. (See also: antivaxxers who cling to HCQ and ivermectin while ignoring that these drugs are manufactured by companies who make vaccines.)
HCQ (among other things like methylene blue from which it is derived) can’t be given to people who are g6pd deficient.
That will indeed cause the side effects of hemolytic anemia (loss of red blood cells, heart attacks, ICU, anemia) we see giving the drug to certain populations for say, malaria. (Or HIV when they tried that.)
you won’t find many g6pd Deficient people in china, however you will find g6pd adaptations for malaria that we don’t have. so HCQ may work differently in their bodies than it does ours. a study that says “HCQ did something a certain way in their bodies” doesn’t mean it will mine.
G6PD deficiency - Prevalence of 0.6% - 2.0% nationwide in china depending on who you ask. So may be easy to dish it out and say no one had deadly side effects.
In the USA it’s about 7%, and then in black males it’s 11%. You can’t give out hcq like candy here without testing for g6pd deficiency. Because even if it did “work,” it would be deadlier than Covid for these populations.
If I had to line up Covid-related papers that should be retracted on the grounds that the science was shoddy this paper would certainly be on the list, but it would be on a list with other, absolutely horrible, irresponsible stuff related to (for example) masks [1], that the same people who railed against this paper continue to believe, almost as religion.
In the Covid debates "both sides" have their shibboleths that are based on atrocious science, so let's not get too sanctimonious about retraction of a single paper.
[1] Since people are downvoting because I said the word "masks", here is just one high-profile example: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029
This paper was found, in subsequent analysis, to have cherry-picked their data sets to achieve a pre-determined outcome:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974
If you find yourself reacting emotionally to this particular topic (or any other related to Covid), you should take a step back and consider that you might be an example of what I'm talking about.
In fact, no. We're finding out that children are having long-term speech and educational issues related to masks [1,2]. And that's without looking very hard, because people continue to make bald assertions about risk that deter actual, high-quality research into the question.
> masks were a net benefit that Americans needed to learn about
In science, claims must be proven. We don't just get to make things up.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/evidence-summary-...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/03/how-masks...
The original paper should be retracted. Full stop.
The paper tells you that the Boston and Chelsea districts were outliers in terms of testing in the first sentence of the Results.
But it's essential to the claims of the original paper, so you should look there, and cross-apply the same criticism. If you can't prove that testing rates were consistent across schools, how can you make the claim of a 30% increase in positivity?
(Hint: Cowager et al. provide the data buried in a supplement. They show that testing practices, in fact, were neither consistent nor stable across time. Both violate the requirements for applying the statistical method used in the original paper.)
Beyond that, the article specifically says how this paper got retracted -- a group of activists pushed for it. I encourage you to push for that other paper to be retracted as well.