From Richard Smith, of Cochrane, which has a good track record in evidence-based medicine,
Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Currently the "most read" article here on BMJ Blogs : https://blogs.bmj.com
Dare we do as Richard Smith suggests and assume this about some Covid research?
Could it really be that some Covid researchers are untrustworthy and might have venal interests at heart?
