Thread by @metasj

Harald Walach, a German parapsychologist, has published two high-impact peer-reviewed papers exaggerating the risks of COVID vaccines & of wearing masks. Very dangerous.

Closed, one-pass #peerreview fails at modern scales of paper production & disinformation propagation. /1

The first paper, discouraging vaccinations, was published in _Vaccines_.

It was retracted, five editors resigned, and Walach's university ended his appointment for potentially 'lead[ing] to public harm', but not before the paper got 500,000 views.
bmj.com/content/374/bm…
/2

The 2d paper, discouraging masking for children, was published in @JAMAPediatrics. It had fatal flaws in theory, design, & data gathering; and (again) drew conclusions that could lead to public harm.

https://twitter.com/trishgreenhalgh/status/1412625244129533958

It has 550,000 views, + has not yet been retracted. /3

@JAMAPediatrics The JAMA paper is driving 80% of all traffic to JAMA Pediatrics rn, and has one of the top-10 altmetrics scores of any paper, of all time.
"an RCT in the gold standard journal" makes a splash.
altmetric.com/top100/2020/

For 12 days now, JAMA has issued no correction or guidance. /4

Even a day of public review by peers identified fatal flaws in each paper.

But as submission volumes rise, closed peer review is increasingly optimized for punchiness over quality, and "barn-door" gatekeeping offers no good mechanisms for correction. /5