[BostonCard]

On May 16, 2020, The Lancet ran an editorial highly critical of Donald Trump.  Suppose this study had contained findings that were favorable toward this drug, not unfavorable.  Do you believe it would have been ushered through to print without substantially more review that, presumably, would have avoided such a problem?  I certainly do.  But, given its unfavorable findings, it was [to repeat myself from another thread] obviously "too good to check."

Unfortunately this is a testable hypothesis, because another high profile paper, by many of the same authors using the same source of data, that had nothing to do with anything that the President talked about, was published in a high profile journal.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007621

Using the dataset provided by Surgisphere, Mandeep Mehra published a high profile paper about whether ACE inhibitors and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers worsened outcomes of COVID-19.  You will recall this was a topic of debate here, as some provocative editorials wondered aloud whether the use of these drugs would lead to increased expression of ACE2, and easier entry of COVID-19 into cells.  In the paper, the authors claimed that ACE inhibitors/ARBs did not worsen COVID-19 outcomes.  And since the president did not say "stop your blood pressure medicines, people are saying they will kill you", you will have to find another theory as to why the paper got into the New England Journal than the journal had it in for the President.

Here's the retraction, FWIW:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NE...tured_home

The papers were "sexy" because they were very large observational datasets in a fast moving disease for which we have a very large hunger for knowledge, not because they contradict something the President said.  Had the underlying data been sound, they would have been the next best thing to a randomized trial.  And for better or for worse, they exploited a flaw in the underlying peer review system, which is that while it can identify analytical weaknesses request additional analyses, and push back against conclusions that are not fully supported by the results, they generally have a hard time catching problems with the underlying dataset.  Having peer reviewed many articles in my career, I know it would have been easy to slip fraudulent or sloppily collected data past me.  In fact, though I would have been within my rights to request the data and the underlying analytical code, I never have, nor have I been asked for it when I published.  You just sort of assume that the people publishing the paper are above board.  Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

BC

[BostonCard]

On May 16, 2020, The Lancet ran an editorial highly critical of Donald Trump.  Suppose this study had contained findings that were favorable toward this drug, not unfavorable.  Do you believe it would have been ushered through to print without substantially more review that, presumably, would have avoided such a problem?  I certainly do.  But, given its unfavorable findings, it was [to repeat myself from another thread] obviously "too good to check."

Unfortunately this is a testable hypothesis, because another high profile paper, by many of the same authors using the same source of data, that had nothing to do with anything that the President talked about, was published in a high profile journal.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007621

Using the dataset provided by Surgisphere, Mandeep Mehra published a high profile paper about whether ACE inhibitors and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers worsened outcomes of COVID-19.  You will recall this was a topic of debate here, as some provocative editorials wondered aloud whether the use of these drugs would lead to increased expression of ACE2, and easier entry of COVID-19 into cells.  In the paper, the authors claimed that ACE inhibitors/ARBs did not worsen COVID-19 outcomes.  And since the president did not say "stop your blood pressure medicines, people are saying they will kill you", you will have to find another theory as to why the paper got into the New England Journal than the journal had it in for the President.

Here's the retraction, FWIW:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NE...tured_home

The papers were "sexy" because they were very large observational datasets in a fast moving disease for which we have a very large hunger for knowledge, not because they contradict something the President said.  Had the underlying data been sound, they would have been the next best thing to a randomized trial.  And for better or for worse, they exploited a flaw in the underlying peer review system, which is that while it can identify analytical weaknesses request additional analyses, and push back against conclusions that are not fully supported by the results, they generally have a hard time catching problems with the underlying dataset.  Having peer reviewed many articles in my career, I know it would have been easy to slip fraudulent or sloppily collected data past me.  In fact, though I would have been within my rights to request the data and the underlying analytical code, I never have, nor have I been asked for it when I published.  You just sort of assume that the people publishing the paper are above board.  Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

BC