Earlier this month, a study showed that COVID-19 articles that are retracted tend to be cited much more than average and continue to be cited largely after their retraction. Clearly, the clinical publication and clinical network want to do better.
Some of my colleagues have been surprised by the number of, indeed, lousy articles that have emerged from the pandemic reaching conclusions that are at odds with the established science thus far. Examples abound, of which we have written several, adding articles by scholars I admired (or at least viewed more favorably than unfavorably), such as John Ioannidis, Vinay Prasad, and many others. Peter Doshi). Apparently, even the Cochrane Collaborative got in on this action, along with the leaders of the shapers. Most were also in the peer-reviewed biomedical literature, but not all. (The utter insanity of an anonymous, non-peer-reviewed study published by the Florida Decomponent of Health last fall that suggested that COVID-19 vaccines are more harmful than COVID comes in Surprise! The article went through several iterations personally supervised by Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, and obviously designed to make the vaccines look worse than the disease). They shouldn’t have been. Array Publishing educational study articles as a form of misinformation and propaganda for quackery is a longstanding tactic used by unscientific medical advocates. , such as the defenders of the medicine of choice and the anti-vaxxers.
That’s why I’m glad one of the most prominent doctors who has become a COVID-19 outlet, Dr. Peter McCullough, reminded me of a study I had on blogs about two weeks ago. Substack articles, titled Retracted Articles on COVID-19: Significantly More Cited than Others, which it touts as evidence that “censorship of the biopharmaceutical complex” is “counterproductive. “University of Massachusetts and titled Retracted Articles on Covid-19: Significantly More Cited than Other Articles in its original journal.
Since I’m not a subscriber to Dr. McCullough’s Substack (and I’ll never pay someone like him for the privilege of reading his articles on Substack), all I can quote is the first paragraph, but the first paragraph is enough to give you’re a smart idea. Naturally, he starts by bragging about his posting history, which I find boring because, as I like to say, I don’t care what I’ve posted in the past. I care a lot about the incorrect information you are posting. posting now and has been posting since the pandemic hit 3 years ago, as the false claim that COVID-19 vaccines are killing thousands, if not millions, of people.
However, let’s see what Dr. McCullough has to say:
Before we move on to the post you’re obviously talking about (which I thank you for reminding me to write), let’s discuss the latest on retractions of “fully published reports” being “extremely rare. ” Guess what? You are right about that! This is where we disagree. He thinks the paucity of pre-pandemic retractions is a smart thing. No. I have long argued that there is a lot of dredge and fraud in the peer-reviewed biomedical literature that can actually just be retracted. Magazines have been painfully reluctant to do so. The most egregious example, the one I really like to cite, is how it took The Lancet thirteen years to retract Andrew Wakefield’s notorious 1998 case series that claimed to link vaccination to the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine ( MMR) with “autism”. enterocolitis,” and it took undeniable revelations of clinical fraud exposed by investigative journalist Brian Deer for Lancet editor Richard Harton to finally drop the case and retract it. I can list a number of other lousy factual anti-vax articles we’ve written about here over the years that deserve to be retracted and in some cases have been retracted, and keep in mind that even when lousy or outright fraud is exposed as well, magazine editors are reluctant to retract, then drag their feet as long as they can before retracting regardless.
Before I go on to talk about the actual examination that Dr. McCullough presents as “evidence” that “censorship of the biopharmaceutical complex” is “counterproductive,” I’ll also mention that I’m quite surprised that this article hasn’t been reproduced more. COVID-19 denial networks since publication. After all, as you can see, what Taros et al discovered is that articles that are eventually retracted through the journals that published them tend to get more citations and engagement than other articles in the same journals (in fact, on the same issues from the same journals where the retracted articles were originally published).
I was struck by a key passage toward the beginning of the study because it obviously went against Dr. McCullough’s lamentations about the rarity of retractions in his smart old days. In summary, the authors note that the growth rate of medical publications increased dramatically in 2020, which, not coincidentally, the year the COVID-19 pandemic hit:
That last part, for me, is key. Retractions are quality control, no, as Dr. McCullough and his opposing admirers and COVID-19 charlatans characterize them, censorship. Again, the challenge with the biomedical literature is not to retract too many studies; It is that they are very few and how complicated it is to reach even those who retract. Taros et al highlight precisely this facet of retractions:
Now that’s a concern. Andrew Wakefield’s series of fraudulent cases, for example, has been widely cited and widely shared on social media (in fact, Retraction Watch ranks it as the most cited retracted article of all time, with 643 citations before retraction and 940 after retraction). . ) The authors note that “the number of COVID-19-related articles that have been retracted continues to more than 200, according to the Retraction Watch Database (RWD) COVID-19 blog (Marcus).
The authors hypothesize:
The authors did not come up with preprints (which is a completely different topic for me, given how often preprints have been militarized through charlatans to get their fake studies into the public record before they are peer-reviewed) or any published papers. after 2021. This last exclusion criterion was due to the fact that the authors considered that the articles published in 2022 would not have had enough time for their listing records to stabilize.
This flowchart what they did:
Most of the 90 retrieved articles focused on epidemiology, disease progression, and treatments; strangely (to me, anyway), the percentage of COVID-19 vaccine articles that were removed was only a third of the number on epidemiology and only a portion of the number on treatment.
Regarding the grounds for withdrawal:
I will admit that it is a delightful wonder that more than a portion of the retractions were initiated through the publisher and only five were retracted for IRB violations. articles did not comply with the Publication Ethics Committee (COPE) rules for withdrawal statements, which states that withdrawal notifications must:
The authors note:
I still cannot ask myself to what extent this disappointing lack of transparency between journals is due to considerations about the legal implications. in a very contentious society. I have to wonder if the explanation as to why so many become aware of the withdrawal does not come with a mention of the party that requested the withdrawal and/or a transparent explanation of the explanation as to why the withdrawal is due to concerns about legal liability.
I also see that the speed of retraction appears to be fast for COVID-19 articles, at least no more than for any other. Take a look at this graph, which is necessarily a Kaplan-Meier survival curve between publication and retraction:
The median time between publication and retraction was 175 days, or nearly six months!It is to say how much time there is between the time a retraction is requested and the actual retraction and how long it takes the newspaper to make a decision, but in fact it is not short.
Now, the silver finding of paper:
Or, to show it visually:
The authors also note that as of November 2020, the retraction rate of COVID-19-related articles had reached a point five times higher than in the general clinical literature, with “clear cases of intentional malpractice and fraudulent publications” in “some of the maximum fraudulent publications. Notable reviews. This, of course, is consistent with what we have been blogging at SBM since the beginning of the pandemic. Considering that those articles have had a disproportionate impact on the clinical literature, the authors speculate on possible reasons:
This is, of course, one of the discoveries that I intuitively feel is almost accurate, but that cannot yet turn out. The authors then admitted that articles on COVID-19 in general have tended to draw more attention than other topics, because, you know, a pandemic that has killed over a million people in the U. S. alone. He has been in the U. S. since early 2020, but argues that this alone can’t make a difference:
That would be attractive research to do. My prediction is that the difference between the number of citations of retracted and unretracted articles would be minimized but still significant. In fact, the location I’m most concerned about is this:
Really, those are what I like to call zombie studies in the sense that they are the walking dead and will live unless very explicit steps are taken to kill them (e. g. , a bullet in the brain), or they are “slasher studies,” called after the unstoppable killers in the horror videos of the 1980s (like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers) who, Even after supposedly being killed at the end of a movie, they always manage to revive to scare away a new organization of teenagers or students in heat. Suites. Whichever characterization you prefer, it’s up to individual scientists to check their citations and not cite retracted papers unless retraction is discussed or at least mentioned.
I will conclude by mentioning that retraction is a double-edged sword. This is, as I have argued many times in the past, a mandatory quality for the clinical literature. Unsurprisingly, quirks, charlatans, and anti-vaxxers don’t see it that way, and never have. The most recent example is Steve Kirsch’s reaction to a very bad article by Professor Mark Skidmore, an economist at Michigan State University. (Shame, shame, on my condition. Although I have no connection to MSU and never went to school there, many other people I have met over the years and some of their youth have. I was also introduced to some members wonderful college of MSU). At the time, I featured the article, titled The Social CircleArray Role of COVID-19 Disease and Vaccination Experiences in COVID-19 Vaccination Decisions: A United States Online Population Survey, as it reminded me, more than anything else, from a “study” via Steve Kirsch laying out a fundamentally flawed study design with (some) likely valid social science studies methodologies, and then dishonestly twisting to produce an estimate fake 278,000 deaths from COVID-19 vaccines, which is then “validated” through some incompetent immersion into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database of the kind I’ve been writing about since 2006 .
Yes, you read that right. Professor Skidmore necessarily did a survey asking other people if they knew anyone who had died after COVID-19 vaccination, and then used that survey to estimate that “the total number of deaths due to COVID-19 inoculation may succeed at 278,000 (95% CI 217,330–332,608) when deaths that would possibly have occurred independently of inoculation are suppressed. Let’s say that the survey/study is as bad as it results from this characterization and that it is a bait and a switch, whose objective apparently “to identify the points related by U. S. citizens to the resolution to get vaccinated against COVID-19” but whose real objective has become temporarily evident: to seek to “prove” that vaccines have killed thousands of people. Not surprisingly, Professor Skidmore is not a scientist with applicable expertise in epidemiology, virology, infectious diseases or medicine. He is a professor of economics.
Fortunately, BMC Infectious Diseases, the journal that had made the mistake of publishing this pseudoscientific propaganda garbage, came to its senses and retracted it, pronouncing it the day before the publication of the study that is the subject of this publication, directory the reasons in a retraction realization:
Interestingly, I myself wondered if this study was done through a proper IRB, as it obviously should have been. Reading between the lines, I suspect Professor Skidmore just said the exam was exempt, but that’s not how IRB exemptions work. The IRB must arrange for the examinee to be exempt. IRB waivers are often granted through an expedited procedure in which the IRB chair or a subset of members reviews the examination protocol and determines that it falls within one of the waiver categories. Admittedly, the study notes that “the survey tool and recruitment protocol for the COVID-19 National Health Experiences Survey was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the State University Human Research Protection Program. ” of Michigan (File Number: STUDY00006960, Approval Date: November 17, 2021) However, I immediately speculated that the IRB had been misled through the aforementioned bait and transfer and that the approval had probably only covered the use of the tool of survey to assess points related to taking and refusing the COVID-19 vaccination. I wondered more if Professor Skidmore had conveniently overlooked planned research in which he used survey effects to estimate the number of other people who died from cause of COVID-19 vaccines I can’t determine whether or not I was right in this speculation, still in hindsight I’m pretty sure I was.
Somehow, Steve Kirsch learned of the shutdown retraction a few days before its announcement and, in keeping with the controversial nature of the charlatans, published an article on his Substack titled It’s Time We Held These People Accountable; which begins the lawsuit, adding that “I will pay the lawsuit to sue Springer and its corrupt editorial board at BMC Infectious Diseases for their resolution to remove Skidmore’s article; the most popular newspaper in its history. “
Yes, sadly, the Skidmore newspaper received social media participation. Hilariously, Steve Kirsch did what Steve Kirsch does so amusingly and posted the effects of his own “survey” on the web, the effects of which were, unsurprisingly, one-sided. :
A few days later, Kirsch attempted to argue that the reasons given for the recall met COPE standards:
In fact, Skidmore’s result was similar to the knowledge discovered through other researchers who dismissed the first fear and the others even came close to being valid.
Which brings us to the inevitable conclusion that the document was unethically retracted.
Was the editor willing to talk about the recall resolution and answer questions?Lol
I will reveal to Mr. Kirsch that I wrote an email to the editors expressing my considerations about the methodological flaws of the article, basically because (1) it doesn’t bother me in the least and (2) if Kirsch goes ahead with his lawsuit, the email will be discovered upon discovering it anyway. I will also mention that I doubt very much that I was the only teacher to do so. More importantly, at the time, I was also very disappointed that I never got a really extensive response, only an acknowledgment from someone in “editorial support”, not even an editor!- that my e-mail had been won. I thought at the time that my considerations were probably not seriously considered, let alone considered.
Regardless, I indexed all my opinions on the article, adding that I believe it was a “bait and switch” in which the number one stated goal was the “bait” used to get IRB approval for the study, while the real primary goal was to arrive at an inflated death toll. I also noticed an ongoing paper that Professor Skidmore had published 11 months earlier, which had used the same method as the retracted paper and was full of anti-vaccine discourse issues that I termed ‘antivax’ more hits compilation. “I also noticed a definite clash of interests in that this was a single-author, single-funder study, and the funder is Catherine Austin Fitts, who appeared in a COVID conspiracy film Planet Lockdown and worked with anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. , as reported in the Washington Post. It should be noted that Professor Skidmore also has a private blog, Lighthouse Economics, which is full of incorrect information about vaccines.
Basically, I didn’t write anything other than what I had posted on my other, not-so-secret blog, suggesting that I get rid of the article because:
All these reasons for requesting withdrawal are in line with OCOPE guidelines, and they would be, in my opinion,
However, Kirsch and Skidmore’s allies call the retraction “censorship” and threaten to prosecute them. Rather, I suspect that everything is performative. For one, consider how Kirsch says he will help any writer who needs to sue. This specific retracted article was a single writer’s article, with Professor Skidmore as the sole writer. If someone was going to register a complaint, they would have to. be him. Since discovery is a two-way street, I deserve to wonder if you would really like everything similar to the publication of this article to be revealed, adding all versions of the protocol, IRB application, reviews, and approval. I rather suspect not, I may be wrong.
Unfortunately, magazine publishers have historically been much more reluctant to remove bad, unethical, or fraudulent articles than they deserve. I can sense some reluctance, though, as each and every retraction is an admission that they made a mistake and accepted a manuscript that never deserves to be published, and that, infrequently, articles that are bad but written honestly they don’t necessarily deserve to be retracted. I can also see the considerations about the legal ramifications. (I realize that by publicly acknowledging that I was one of the academics who wrote to the editor of BMC Infectious Diseases to express their views on the article, he might have bought me a statement if Professor Skidmore makes the decision to sue, but in the event On the other hand, your lawyers will see that email anyway if you sue. ) Journals want to do more anyway because, like the Taros et al study, retracted articles on COVID-19 have a pernicious and distorting effect on medical literature. Beyond examining, they serve as the clickbait used by anti-vaxxers, pandemic minimizers, and opponents of public fitness interventions to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about medicine, science, and fitness. public. More generally, we as a clinical network will also have to try harder not to mention retracted documents, unless it is in the context of the retraction discussion.
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