Science Has an Ugly, Complicated Dark Side. And the Coronavirus Is Bringing It Out.

It'd be foolish to base any major health policy on one scientific study and it's unclear if this study played a role in the country's fiasco over testing--widely regarded as a major failure of the administration's COVID-19 response--but it's nonetheless alarming that it was repeated as fact by the very people we're trusting to lead our country through the pandemic. That said, the mixup isn't entirely Birx's fault; after all, the study was published in a journal after peer review and it wasn't marked on PubMed as withdrawn until weeks after the retraction occurred. The real problem here is that this study even had the prominence it did. As the co-founders of Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks academic retractions, wrote in a recent article for Wired, the case involving Birx "is a particularly dismaying and consequential example of what happens when no one bothers to engage in scientific fact-checking." "But," they cautioned, "it will not be the last time that something we thought we knew about the coronavirus because it was in a published paper will turn out to be wrong."