1. One of the best parts of my corner of twitter is watching incredibly smart people like @mlipsitch @nataliexdean @trvrb carry our peer review in real time. And as Marc says in this thread, it’s important to remember that spending time critiquing work is a mark of respect....
2. But watching their work, and @CT_Bergstrom as well, has made me even more skeptical of the value of medical preprints. Yes, science often advances through the accumulation of many contributions in which few single studies are definitive. But in the current environment...
3. Preprints making striking claims are almost immediately reported to the wider public prior to the kind of rigorous and thoughtful review in the link above. And at that point, the toothpaste is out of the tube....
4. ...the public sees the striking claim and it feeds into and exacerbates uncertainty. And at the moment, it feeds into the idea that we may not have as much to lose by reopening the country as we thought. My point is not that the paper is necessarily wrong...
5... my point is that it just isn’t clear to me that it is better to rush this to the public before rigorous peer review then to wait for that review and to present a better product, in a clearer context, to the public.
