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Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
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10 Jun, 10 tweets, 4 min read
Consider the harm they did when they told the world the Sputnik vaccine was astonishingly effective. Or that the origins of Covid19 were zoonotic--end of story!--and to question this marked you as a wild-eyed conspiracy freak. Or the damage they did to chronic fatigue patients-
and this list just goes on and on. How about the damage they did to the emotional health of Iraq War veterans, or all the people they smeared for pointing out problems in the data.
Or the fraudulent hydroxychloroquine paper, published when the world most *needed* to be confident of papers about this drug published in the Lancet. Or the social distancing paper. taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3977561
Or the paper about cardiac disease and Covid. Or that idiotic Ivermectin paper. Or its letter to the editor about Gaza (from renowned anti-semites). Or their fraudulent paper on gun control. haaretz.com/jewish/no-seco…
It's just one fraud and scandal after the other. The same issues keep coming up: Fraudulent data, conflicts of interest, and articles published because they conform to their political bias. cjr.org/special_report…
independent.co.uk/news/media/lan…
The editor simply refuses to learn from experience: He does it again and again. In the past week, I've heard from half a dozen doctors who've told me, "Oh, yes, of course--the Lancet's a rag; I don't take anything they publish seriously."
independent.co.uk/news/media/lan…
The problem is that many people do. I did. I ran an article that said, "Surprisingly, the Sputnik has done really well in clinical trials, according to the Lancet!" It didn't occur to me that they might just be taking the authors' word for it about the data.
They're causing genuine harm. Medical harm, and surely deaths. The editor should resign immediately. It makes *no* sense that two editors of JAMA resigned over a podcast that supposedly was offensive (though I can't figure out how), but Horton hasn't.
He's caused grave harm to patients and grave harm to the public trust. If scientists fail to pressure him to resign, they should not be surprised if the public rolls its collective eyes when next told to "follow the science."

This is a *grave* harm.
Scientists need to police their own. Modern industrial societies can't function without science and some modicum of public trust in the scientific enterprise. The betrayal of public trust involved here is serial, flagrant, and manifestly harmful. #HortonResign.

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More from @ClaireBerlinski

Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
10 Jun
Does it seem odd to anyone else that the editors of JAMA resigned over this podcast--which caused no medical harm to anyone--forbes.com/sites/brucelee…
but the editor of the Lancet has not resigned, despite scandal after scandal linked to hoax after hoax that he failed to detect--and then failed to retract, after smearing the whistleblowers--
as a result of which thousands if not hundreds of thousands of patients have received inadequate care (the PACE scandal); research money has failed to go where it should have (ditto--
Read 12 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
8 Jun
You mean, most journalists lack a basic science education? Yes, I think that's sometimes true. And many are too-easily cowed by credentials. But laziness plays a large role, too--or to be kinder, lack of time. Example:
When I actually bothered to read it, I realized that the references in the infamous Nature article didn't, actually, support the argument the authors were making. That was something I *could* have seen on the day it was published.
I'm not a virologist or a biochemist, but I can read a paper, look up the terms, and ask, "Is this evidence of what they say it is?" I certainly understand enough biology, chemistry, and logic to do that. My reading comprehension skills are good.
Read 25 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
6 Jun
Why, on June 6, after all the reporting that's been done in the past month--including *by the Washington Post*--are two WaPo reporters going with this "experts say it's nearly impossible" nonsense? washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…
@washingtonpost, don't you have editors? If so, they should be preventing your reporters from saying something that makes them look as if they even don't read the newspaper they write for, no less any other news organ.
You realize, don't you, that these experts--kind of famously!--have been caught up in a massive corruption scandal? That this is actually *the biggest story* in the global news right now? I mean, seriously:
Read 10 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
5 Jun
This is an extraordinary account of the rise of DRASTIC. It suggests interesting things. What DRASTIC did is what the media, in principle, is supposed to do. This is the disinfectant of sunlight. But the media missed all of this.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-…
A handful of wackadoos are now congratulating themselves for having insisted, from the start, that it came from a lab. But they didn't do what DRASTIC did: find evidence to support their instinct.
If you insisted it came from a Wuhan lab before seeing any evidence, that's not because you're prescient; it's because you're as lazy as your journalistic confrères who swallowed the zoonosis story wholesale.
Read 14 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
1 Jun
There are further reasons to keep this question alive. At a time when public confidence in our institutions has reached a truly dangerous nadir, it's important to shore up the few that remain:
We need to ask how a scientist *with* a conflict of interest--a classic conflict-- was able to round up so many members of his profession and persuade them to sign a letter in Nature putting their professional imprimatur behind a statement with massive political ramifications--
while signing it with the words, "I declare I have no conflict of interest." Science as an institution can't survive unless we insist it be practiced by certain rules, among them, declaring conflicts of interest honestly.
Read 4 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
31 May
I'm not persuaded that understanding the origins is key to risk mitigation. We should operate on the assumption that both a zoonotic and lab origin are plausible and thus behave as if *both* happened:
Every precaution we'd strive to put in place if we established a zoonotic origin *should be put in place.* Every precaution we'd strive to put in place if we established a lab origin *should be put in place.*
If we discover an infected intermediary species in a cave somewhere, we should *not* say, "Phew! We can stop worrying about biosecurity! Let's go back to collecting bat viruses and seeing if we can get them to bind to human ACE2!"
Read 4 tweets

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