Thread by @normative

I have no idea if this is plausible, and I’m fairly certain the editors of the Wall Street Journal don’t either. Whether it’s correct or not, op-ed pages seem like a pretty obviously horrible place to float technical empirical claims like this.

https://twitter.com/allahpundit/status/1401581696429006861

If it’s correct, or at least has a good chance of being correct, it should be reported in the news pages after peer review. If it’s wrong, you’ve leapfrogged that process and given it unwarranted currency. Either way, this is not a useful “opinion”.

Which is to say, it does not present an argument that the normal reader (or, really, 99.9% of the readership) has any meaningful capability to evaluate.

I’m among that 99.9% and have no idea if this claim holds water, but I do find it bizarre that a couple of scientists would opt to present it in this venue, rather than, you know… to their peers.

Obviously lots of op-eds turn at least IN PART on an expert assessment readers have to decide how much weight to give based on credentials, but this is ENTIRELY that. I see no possible benefit to foisting it unmediated on a general audience.

Honestly, running a piece like this seems borderline unethical. *At best* you’re very lucky & rushing a true claim around the normal validation process. At worst you’re presenting misinformation to an audience totally unequipped to evaluate it. And you have no idea which.

A cursory search shows that one of the authors, Quay, uploaded a paper advancing his argument to an open-access repository in January & then pushed out a YouTube video & press releases touting it.

While I am, again, no more qualified to evaluate the substance than the modal Wall Street Journal reader, this is not how reputable science normally operates.

…and this is not what the bio line on serious research by credible researchers normally looks like.

The more I look at this guy’s site the more red flags pop up, and the more appalled I am WSJ decided to run this.

Muller is a retired physicist. Quay is what we might charitably call an “aggresively self-promoting” MD & entrepreneur (subscribe to his wellness newsletter, or book him to speak!) whose specialty until about a year ago appears to have been breast cancer.

So these are a couple of guys who, while accomplished in other fields, don’t appear to be specialists in virology, given a massive national platform to advance a highly technical thesis without submitting to the peer review proceess that normally filters such claims.

Whether or not they’re right—again, I don’t know, and don’t have any particular dog in that fight—this is journalistic malpractice. You’re accountable for scientific claims you present to readers who can’t directly assess them, even if you put them on the “opinion” page.

In case anyone else was confused, my claim is not “newspapers should banish any mention of scientific research in opinion essays.” It’s that a mass-readership op-ed page shouldn’t be where nonspecialist researchers go to launder novel assertions that haven’t survived peer review.

https://twitter.com/aaronsibarium/status/1401736985824448514

I can’t tell whether their claim makes sense, but if it does they should pitch it to the NEJM or the Lancet, where it will be reviewed by people who are equipped to render that judgment. Then if they want to write an op-ed summarizing their published paper, godspeed.

Contrast, say, this recent Washington Post op-ed. Here, the authors ARE actual subject matter experts, but they’re not just offering their own conclusions based on personal authority; they’re using that expertise to guide the reader through a survey of the published literature.

Here’s the link I babbled too long to fit in the previous tweet. Maybe Rasmussen & Goldstein turn out to be wrong and Quay & Muller turn out to be right, but this is what a responsible mass-audience science essay looks like. washingtonpost.com/outlook/virus-…

Quay & Muller do link published research on the COVID genome, but they’re not telling you *what the authors of that study* concluded. They’re telling you what novel inference a physicist and a breast cancer specialist think follows from that research…

…and they’re doing it in a forum that bypasses the usual nicety of having actual virologists assess that claim before it sees print.