We move on to Covid vaccines. The day we wrote this, Tom was contacted by a major TV station who wanted to interview him on their performance. He declined. Not because he wanted to keep out of controversy. We would not be writing in TTE if that were the case.
The reasons go back to our personal scientific experience. The antivirals series documented why we mistrust big journals and their articles, which, in some cases, are thinly veiled adverts for one or more products.
The better it sounds, the more likely it is to be too good to be true. Big journals are a specialised media business. We have abundant examples of that fact, but Tamiflu's rise is perhaps the best-documented example.
A modestly performing drug with central nervous system toxicity was pedalled through ghostwritten selected data via mega journals. Journal article “authors” had never seen the whole datasets, and few, if any, had participated in the analysis or editing of the articles. To this day, 60% of the randomised dat…
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