Thread by @GidMK

So, this is still ongoing, but I think there's an important lesson here in how wildly problematic academic debate is as a forum during a pandemic

https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1396654447791525890

The bottom line is pretty depressing - we've spent months arguing back and forth, meanwhile this paper has had a HUGE impact and probably impacted policy decisions across the world

Thing is, our debate about this article has been FAST by academic standards

Three letters/responses for a single article published in 6 months? Snappy by many standards

And yet, it was still not even close to being quick enough to address any questions with the conclusions before the paper was used by real people to make real life-or-death decisions

That's pretty frightening

Academic debate was simply not designed to look at issues in the timeline of a pandemic. 6 months is a lifetime during COVID-19

Forget this paper and this argument. There have been dozens of similar examples, some where the papers were eventually retracted

They still took FAR too long

I honestly don't have a good solution other than completely reimagining scientific publishing somehow, but it is still quite a sad thing to watch academic discussion fail so completely to inform in a timely manner

The other issue is with attention. The initial published article has an Altmetric score of 19,000 (!). Our letter in response is 206, their response to that is 409, and our newest letter only 9

This is also the landing page of the original article. No evidence here at all that there is the slightest debate about the study or its conclusions

It's fair to say that 99%+ of people who have read the study probably assume that there is no scientific issue with it, even though there are several letters pointing out problems ~published in the same journal~