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Scientists always right until proved wrong!

Science can be a messy business, with lots of egos competing to be published, secure funding or win the government's ear.

As editor of The Lancet, one of the world's leading science journals, Richard Horton has to be on his guard to try to stop fraudulent, useless or harmful research appearing on his pages. It's a tough job, as he set out in 1995: "The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."

Twenty-five years on, horseshit data is still submitted for publication and the supposed safety-net of peer review still fails to spot it, as Horton had to admit when hastily retracting a paper on hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine to treat Covid-I9. Horton is now medicine's grand inquisitor, leading calls for a public inquiry into thousands of avoidable Covid-19 deaths. He has written a book, "The Covid-19 catastrophe: What's gone wrong and how to prevent it happening again", in which he does at least mention that, on 24 January 2020, he tweeted a call for caution. "Media are escalating anxiety by talking of a 'killer virus' + 'growing fears'... From what we currently know, the virus has moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity. There is no reason to foster panic with exaggerated language."

Horton reverse ferreted and upped the alarm after reading papers from China and is now very critical that these warnings weren't heeded sooner. But can he really complain that many people take their science with a pinch of scepticism? WHO spokespeople have said asymptomatic spread of CV-19 is "very rare" - and in the space of a week changed to - "may account for up to 40 percent of cases". And a WHO paper on the two-metre rule just published in the Lancet has been criticised as "flawed" and "deeply suspicious". It says cutting the gap to one metre doubles infection risk; but others say it increases up to ten-fold. Who's right?

Private Eye 1524 - June 19th 2020