(PART 1)‘Fake News?’ It’s ‘Fake Science’ that terrifies me
2-part article exploring how ‘evidence-based’ medical practice, policy development and public opinion aren’t always as reliable as we imagine…
Pandemic claims yet another another victim…the credibility of respected scientific journals.
I feel like a lot of people, including myself, are increasingly skeptical of information from virtually any source…hard to know where to go for good, reliable info these days. For example, the other day I was curious about Covid-19 in South Florida hospitals and I felt like (sadly) my best option was to message my trusted ER-doc friend who works in a Miami-area emergency room, and directly ask him “so how do your ER and ICU look these days?”
However, I still felt like I could at least rely on information in papers published in respected journals that had been subjected to the ‘peer review’ process: subjecting the author’s scholarly work to the rigorous scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. This has the advantage of increasing transparency in science and provides credibility.
Mostly peer-review works pretty well, but the recent scandal surrounding hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug being explored for activity against Covid-19, shook me up pretty badly. Peer-reviewed science has vulnerabilities that can result in a dangerous product: ‘Fake Science.’
Fake Science can result from incorrect data collected by well-intentioned scientists and from falsified research. When published in respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals, this falsified or incorrect data gains credibility. It’s particularly dangerous because we tend to view peer-reviewed science as gospel and we base a lot of important decisions on it, feeling warm and secure that we are making ‘evidence-based’ decisions.
The peer-review system is meant to find flaws in research; it is NOT designed for sniffing out deliberately falsified research. As Lancet editor Dr. Horton says, “If you have an author who deliberately tries to mislead, it’s surprisingly easy for them to do so.” And it happens much more frequently than we would like — check out this organization Retractionwatch that only exists to track and share retracted research; the first few I reviewed were shocking.
Anyway, in early June the Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and most respected peer-reviewed scientific journals, retracted an article from April about the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine causing dangerous heart arrhythmias (you’ve all heard aspects of the subsequent debate, there was no escaping it). It was a real shock to me personally to see such a prestigious journal have to retract an article that had had so much impact, (I wasn’t aware till now how common this issue actually is) especially under the particularly unsavory circumstances of the retraction.
The study claiming higher mortality rates with hydroxychloroquine had been published in April, and when it came time for the raw data to be handed over, the primary source of the data, Surgisphere, refused — something about it violating client privacy issues.
By then it was too late — US administration and the WHO and many other countries had already made large-scale, ‘evidence based’ policy decisions (in this case halting all hydroxychloroquine trials), based on evidence that was so suspect (never made available!) the published study had to be retracted and the Lancet apologized to its readership.
The hydroxychloroquine article was retracted in early June after it had been published for about two months and the WHO resumed trials with hydroxychloroquine.
But on July 1, the U.S. FDA updated it’s position withdrawing the emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine, citing “serious heart rhythm problems and other safety issues.”
And of course hydroxychloroquine had been a HUGE political issue for months:
Let me make crystal clear I’m not getting political here — I’m just trying to make a point: ONE SINGLE ARTICLE that later had to be retracted under terribly suspicious circumstances, STILL had time to influence global health policy. And as you can see from the above screenshot of my first image search for cartons about this, it certainly had real impact on the American political opinion landscape!
Now, EVERYONE in research knows that to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, all scientists must be able to provide their raw data. Surgisphere DEFINITELY would have known this, along with all the study authors and in fact it was several of the article authors who were not associated with Surgisphere who requested the retraction (along with a profuse apology), saying that Surgisphere refused to turn over the data set for the usual independent review and therefore they could “no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.”
Dr. Richard Horton, editor in chief of the Lancet, called their paper a fabrication and “a monumental fraud”. Dr. Eric Rubin, editor in chief of NEJM, said “We shouldn’t have published this” about ANOTHER Surgisphere paper in New England Journal of Medicine that has been withdrawn for the same issues.
Strange…no, I need to call it what it is, RIDICULOUSLY SUSPICIOUS…that Surgisphere would participate in bringing papers to publication (knowing they would have to be retracted when the tedious peer review process finally caught up with them. Even the authors seem very carefully chosen.
So a paper got published that affected global policy and opinion, even though the source of the data must have known it would ultimately be retracted. Media and public agencies and politicians duly reported this ‘evidence-based research’ and based their positions on this info, and by the time the article was retracted it was too late: opinions and positions had been set and many folks were too deeply dug in on the debate to easily change their positions. So it was ‘real news’ that was fake because of ‘fake science.’
Now other research using Surgisphere’s data set is being questioned and a damning series of audits have revealed more issues with vascular surgeon and Surgisphere CEO Sapan Desai’s work:
- Major institutions described as research partners on Surgisphere’s site (including Stanford) deny any formal relationship with the company.
- Desai’s PhD study may contain doctored images and the global medical publishing company Elsevier is conducting a review of his papers.
- Claims about his qualifications have been called into doubt, including his claims to hold two PhDs, a master’s, and affiliations with major universities and colleges. Some affiliations have now been removed from his website.
If Dasai’s other research is similarly flawed, who knows what far-reaching other impacts may be caused? Retraction of incorrect or ‘fake science’ doesn’t even take away it’s impact; like ‘fake news,’ once it is revealed to be fake it STILL continues influencing things, and this is a common problem in research:
Should we abandon peer review? Of course not — the journals do the best they can and the volume of material is monstrous. But there is no way the peer review process can keep up with everything and it’s designed to look for flawed, not fraud studies!
This is not the first time deliberately false information has passed through scientific journals or the WHO or national governments agency publicatims, either. China’s coronavirus data has come under a lot of scrutiny and questioning recently, especially after statistical analysis of their data showed it to be highly suspect.
And it’s a little strange that only Iran’s graph of daily new coronavirus cases has this mysterious rapid drop early on in April (see graph), when not so many people were infected and it would have been easier to keep a lid on the numbers. Some Iranian-American friends shared with me what their relatives in Iran told them the government was telling its people…MAYBE they were the ONLY country with a big mysterious drop like this, or maybe there was a testing lack that caused the drop, but I’m not the only skeptic about this. It’s possible they reported the drop until so many people were getting infected they had no choice but to revise their numbers up. Hard to know, really…but international global policy is based on reported info like this that may or may not be true.
This is not a new issue — the vulnerability of science’s credibility has been around for a long time. The most famous is probably the story of Andrew Wakefield.
In 1998 the Lancet published a study by the now-notorious Dr. Andrew Wakefield linking the MMR vaccine with ‘enterocolitis autism’ that became the basis for the modern anti-vaccine movement. After blatantly falsifying his data to show a causal link between autism and vaccines, Wakefield (in partnership with the father of one of the boys in the study) planned to make about $43 million annually selling diagnostic kits for this new condition. At hearings, original hospital data was held up next to Wakefield’s report and the wholesale changes in results were shamefully clear.
Media celebrity support from Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey, among many others, helped fuel the surge in anti-vaccine support. Tens of millions have been spent (read: wasted) either trying to prove or disprove Wakefield’s fraud. Wakefield went on to date Elle Macpherson and become an international celebrity and hero to millions of antivaxxers around the world.
Of course, the article was eventually retracted (twelve years later) and Wakefield lost his license to practice and is widely despised by the scientific and especially the healthcare community, but TWELVE YEARS went by. A LOT of public opinion and policy was formed based on Wakefield’s Fake Science and did irreversible damage before it was retracted. At that point it was too late.
So all the celebrities touting anti-vaccine positions to their millions and millions of followers? They all have one thing in common: horribly flawed science. They probably believe it, so what they say isn’t ‘fake news:’ It’s REAL news (to them), as it were, but since it’s based on a total lie, unfortunately their ‘REAL news’ is actually fake because it’s Fake Science.
At that stage I was like “who is left to trust??” It’s always tempting to give easy credibility to peer-reviewed scientific literature in respected journals, and ‘evidence based’ is a pillar of medical and policy development — quite rightly, too. These things SHOULD be based on the best available evidence.
But even if researchers have only the most honest intentions, there’s still another problem: the reliability of scientific data itself.
We’ll look at that in Part 2:
