The Pandemic Claims New Victims: Prestigious Medical Journals (archive)
One study promised that popular blood-pressure drugs were safe for people infected with the coronavirus. Another paper warned that anti-malaria drugs endorsed by President Trump actually were dangerous to these patients.
The studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, were retracted shortly after publication, following an outcry from researchers who saw obvious flaws.
The hasty retractions, on the same day this month, have alarmed scientists worldwide who fear that the rush for research on the coronavirus has overwhelmed the peer review process and opened the door to fraud, threatening the credibility of respected medical journals just when they are needed most.
[...] "The problem with trust is that it's too easy to lose and too hard to get back," said Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, which published one of the retracted papers in early May. "These are big blunders."
If outside scientists detected problems that weren't identified by the peer reviewers, then the journals failed, he said. Like hundreds of other researchers, Dr. Kassirer called on the editors to publish full explanations of what happened.
See also: US FDA pulls its emergency approval of chloroquine use for COVID-19
[NB: This follows up on "Doubt Looms Over Hydroxychloroquine Study That Halted Global Trials" which was part of 2020-06-15 Roundup of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV2, Coronavirus) Stories --martyb]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @05:35AM
This bastardization of freedom has a very dangerous precedent. Let me give you another little quote:
The quote is from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was arguing, in a form not very different from your argument, that eugenics is ultimately little more than a vaccination. It requires the individual to suffer what is, from their perspective, a modest sacrifice in order to ensure an overall greater good. Interestingly enough, the court case that this was from (Buck v Bell) has never actually been overturned.
I think it's important we never bastardize notions, for that bastardization tends to swing both ways. In this case it's even more absurd. The whole point of vaccinations is to protect you in cases of exposure to the disease. In particular vaccinations originated from the discovery that cow maids, who were regularly exposed to cow pox, were seemingly immune to small pox. And indeed they were. It didn't matter that the rest of the world was not vaccinated. Herd immunity can of course help matters since vaccines may not be 100% effective, but now you're pushing to force somebody to do something they don't want in order to move some decimal place a fraction of a point - not even to achieve a major victory.