Can you provide examples? I'm sure it'll be hard, if not impossible, to provide an example that's as emotionally satisfying as directly contradicting Trump, but I'd love to see which studies you're thinking of.
Don't forget, The Lancet is also the journal which published the paper that kicked off the anti-vax movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud
> ACE2 can also be increased by thiazolidinediones and ibuprofen.
The closest thing I could find [2] to a source for that was [1]:
> NSAIDs [Non-Steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs, which includes ibuprofen] might affect how Covid-19 binds to human cells, according to Dr. Yogen Kanthi, assistant professor of cardiology at the University of Michigan, who studies inflammation.
> “There is data from basic science studies that have shown that Covid-19 itself binds to a protein at the surface of cells called ACE2,” he said. “There is a hypothetical risk that giving NSAIDs like ibuprofen could increase levels of ACE2 shown in animal models, but not in patients.”
[0] - https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanres/PIIS2213-2600...
[1] - https://kvia.com/health/2020/03/17/france-says-ibuprofen-may...
Why? They knew the data was fake when they published it, but they published it anyway to boost sales of Remdesivir.
They're literally trying to make money by killing people. If you wouldn't trust someone if you saw them run over someone else with their car, why would you trust Lancet?
Peer Review gone wrong -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLlA1w4OZWQ
Precisely the way trump himself behaves, but you don't point that out.
You illustrate my point by assuming that I'm supporting him, just because I'm not criticizing him.
So what you're saying is we should never fully trust these journals? We should always be skeptical?
That's what I'm saying too...
YES, you should be skeptical, but mostly not at the journal-level. You need to be skeptical at the article-level. That is why it's so important to be actually TRAINED to interpret the studies.
The abstract of a trial is like an "advertisement" for the study. You quickly scan it to see if the study is worth reading. If it is, you make multiple passes of the article, identifying biases, understanding the study context, calculating ratios and numbers, reading through the lens of your own practice, and a bunch of other things.
So yes, I'd argue that brand names are a big problem. You just have to see how proud people are when they are accepted in one of the major publication venues, and the prestige that results.
I think you are not being objective.
"No, the real scandal is that the respected medical journal Lancet aids and abets in poor research practices by serving as a kind of shield for the authors of a questionable paper, by acting as if secret pre-publication review has more validity than open post-publication review." [1]
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/01/this-ones-...
HN isn’t the ideal venue for hyperbole.
One should always be skeptical of research and have dicsussions on the reported data and to what extent and in what context it makes sense. The media outlets summarizing the research papers very often fail to do that so as to skip the details and keep the readers happy because they assume "readers just want to know the superficial abstract knowledge, they can't possibly be interested in the critical analysis of the figures and the numbers so let's exclude that".
I think that exactly how good scientists proceed. This isn't my field, but my understanding is that research groups don't "fully trust" peer reviewed research, so they usually attempt to replicate the key results they plan to cite in their new research.
In fact, scientists often say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, "It's published in Nature, so it's probably wrong" (the more revolutionary a result, the more likely it is to be wrong, but also the more likely it is to get into one of the top journals).
If your implication is that the media and the science community conspired to make the president look stupid, I think you've got a big hill to climb to prove that.
...and I think it's possible that's what we see here. An emotional decision to publish, and then no one wanted to contradict because no one wanted to be viewed as a Trump sympathizer.
This incident comes in the middle of the replication crisis, with 50%-70% of studies failing replication, including in the medical sciences field. Furthermore, many suspect that BigPharma pushes inconclusive garbage as peer reviewed science to promote commercial interests. Then there is the response to covid19, which, justified or not, some regard as catastrophic overreaction. The BigScience enterprise is in peril of losing public trust. Which is a terrible loss.
Lancet / NEJM editors failed. There are no excuses. The right course of action is to apologize, not to further antagonize the public. Try humility for a while.
This is an absurd reaction and I suspect you know it. There isn't a single scientific journal in the world not subject to some bias, trend, or failure of one form or another. To dismiss an entire platform because of an imperfect record amounts to an abdication of your own responsibility to form your own opinions about scientific matters. This is a responsibility for which journal reviewers can only ever take partial responsibility for both practical and intrinsic reasons.
Peer review is not a rubber stamp which blesses anything which passes through it as "TRUTH." It is a minimal standard and subject, at any rate, to all the uncertainties and biases implicit in any human endeavor. It is entirely possible this paper represents a political bias. Almost everything does. It still falls to us to make reasonable judgments about science. What doesn't make sense is to reject the entire process because it fails to meet some unreachable expectation of perfection.