Follow the narrative, not the evidence.

Then you’ll be OK.

TTE’s open letter to the Cochrane Board points out that a series of rapid reviews on the effects of sundry non-pharmaceutical interventions undermined or ignored the rationale for the Cochrane Collaboration. Authors and editors did not follow the rules nor the spirit of those who came together long ago to create Cochrane and kept going, whatever the costs, within the rules.

What is also worrying is that the rapid reviews, which included junk studies, such as models, plugged the gap of a long-standing Cochrane review on the same topics. Review A122 was delayed for six months, which saw the gap filled with reviews filled with poor quality evidence (if models can be called evidence).

Between us, we have over  40 years of experience of working with and publishing Cochrane reviews. In that time, we have never observed the subversion of high-quality evidence and its replacement with an approach that could be described as a race to the bottom.

A possible argument for the hasty production of rev…