That's pretty funny. I do some niche research on liposomal delivery systems.🙂 Though as a translational researcher my goal is always and consistently to take it all back to the clinic, so kinda un-niche things. Truth be told there are well-regarded low impact factor journals. A good editor has full control over keeping junk away from reviewers. But predatory publishing has different priorities and what I think is going on is lack of prescreening can serve as a kind of cost reduction. Though I don't know how much the wear down reviewers. I do know that I got 4 or 5 review requests just this week...
The HCQ thing was a huge mess. Essentially, there's no incentive in double checking data source integrity. Surgisphere made up data, and the investigators wanted to be quick like most of us during COVID (hell, even I got a COVID kind of editorial in a very high impact journal). The original HCQ study on the other hand was more than just naïveté. There's a long article on that. I think that paper turned out to have not even been sent out to reviewers. And it only took a 5min read to see that they excluded all patients who went to the ICU on HCQ.
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He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19. (Published 2020)
The man behind Trump’s favorite unproven treatment has made a great career assailing orthodoxy. His claim of a 100 percent cure rate shocked scientists around the world.www.nytimes.com
I feel like I know way more about Liposomal delivery systems… and especially their development and testing than anyone should just because I’m friends with this guy. He’s really quite into it and has made some very interesting contributions.
Don’t get me started about those early HCQ studies out of France. I have a number of rants pointing out how flawed the studies were. The first study was ex vivo which obviously means nothing. In the second, I distinctly remember the patients transferred to the ICU being excluded- certainly no problem doing that (sarcasm) As I recall they required two consecutive negative COVID tests to call a patient recovered. Except when you looked at the raw data there were patients positive-negative-negative-positive that they declared cured and patients who would be positive-negative-positive. Honestly it called more into question their COVID testing technique and test reliability than anything. And there were many, many other problems.
It’s amazing how many studies exist (including in peer reviewed studies) where the claims made by the authors are just not supported by the data.
And it’s not just Trump that was duped by Raoult. Many US states spent god knows how much money buying up HCQ inventory. Macron had a spectacle with him, personally visiting him to thank him. Then there were at least a couple countries that adopted HCQ as official treatment and prophylaxis.
There are so many lessons to be learned from COVID about how to and how not to handle a pandemic. I hope we (our government, govt agencies, medical authorities, etc) do.