Weekend reads: RFK Jr’s 2011 retraction; ‘the great AI witch hunt’; scientific misconduct in Switzerland

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

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17 thoughts on “Weekend reads: RFK Jr’s 2011 retraction; ‘the great AI witch hunt’; scientific misconduct in Switzerland”

  1. Having a skeptic lead the health agencies is a win for science. It will demand stronger efficacy and safety testing and decrease debacles like the American people being told that there was a COVID vaccine that stopped transfer.

    1. A skeptic wants to see evidence. A denier ignores evidence when it’s presented. Form your own views, but to me it’s pretty clear which side of this like RFK Jr. falls on.

        1. Can you provide a reference to support the assertion that “the vaccine was effective at stopping transfer [of the initial variant]”?

        2. 30 percent protection, degrading to zero over the course of 12 weeks, does not met the pre-covid definition of a vaccine, and is not an effective tool for stopping the spread of a virus.

          1. First of all, protection against infection and (especially serious) disease are two different entities. You focus on the protection against infection, and ignore the protection against severe disease.

            Second, there is no “pre-covid definition of a vaccine” that includes “stopping the spread of a virus” or “do not get infected”. The inactivated polio vaccine, for example, does not stop infection. It does almost completely stop the virus getting into your central nervous system and cause the disease we most commonly associated with polio: paralysis of muscle groups.

          2. If vaccines had to be defined as preventing infection, the shingles vaccine would be a logical impossibility. I was infected with the virus about 45 years prior to getting the vaccine. But I still got it, due to its documented effectiveness in preventing shingles symptoms. This seems like a perfectly reasonable goal for a vaccine.

          3. “30 percent protection, degrading to zero over the course of 12 weeks, does not met the pre-covid definition of a vaccine”
            Care to provide a link to the definition of a vaccine, pre- or post-covid?
            Here is the definition from Merriam Webster: “a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease”
            Wikipedia: “A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease.”
            NIH: “Vaccines stimulate the immune system to produce immune responses that protect against infection.” http://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/vaccines
            The COVID vaccines fit all of those definitions. None of them state anything about stopping the spread of an infectious agent. By your made-up definition, no vaccine is a vaccine. Even the flu vaccine does not stop transmission.

          4. “protection against infection” is different from “effective at stopping transfer”?

            Of course it is.

    2. He’s not a skeptic. He’s a denialist. Those who voted for Trump owe the rest of us an apology; we were warned Trump wanted to put RFKJr in charge of HHS.

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