Trust and "Science"

We have argued before that Quality work contains an element of Trust. Trust means that we can rely upon the representation of the presenter for providing an honest, truthful, factual, and reproducible conclusion or discovery. Over the years, being on the business side, I have seen more and more these "scientists" having peer reviewed papers presenting un-reproducible results. I unfortunately have seen that first hand at at a significant cost.

The Lancet paper on Hydroxychloriquine is the most recent example. I have no horse in this race and frankly do not understand how that alleged therapeutic even works, so I cannot reliably opine regarding its effectiveness. However, having read well over 2,000 papers since this pandemic has arisen has shown me that there are more tenth rate "scientists" than I ever thought. When I write about this I clearly say it is opinion, may be wrong, and it solely for a thought experiment at best. Frankly what we may know about this virus may just be minuscule. But it appears that everyone wants to be an expert. Worse, everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame.

Now to the Lancer article. There is now a retraction. (Note there is a NEJM retraction also) They note:

Our independent peer reviewers informed us that ... would not transfer the full dataset, client  contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process. We always aspire to perform our research in accordance with the highest ethical and professional guidelines. We can never forget the responsibility we have as researchers to scrupulously ensure that we rely on data sources that adhere to our high standards. Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources. Due to this unfortunate development, the authors request that the paper be retracted.

It seems to me they are blaming a third party yet the third party in my opinion seems to have been an author. The burden is fully on the authors. Let us hope that no Government money was used, otherwise we will possible have a Dingell II  event like the Baltimore smearing by the Congressman. Now perhaps they may have a real target of opportunity.

As to trust, once lost, never regained. Moreover, "science" gets smeared with a patina of charlatanism.