The remarkable story of how scientists with some of the worlds biggest platforms shared a fatally flawed pre-print

Source: How junk science got spread like wildfire

Past research found that 59% of the items shared on social media are shared based on the headline only, and the sharer had not read the underlying article or study.

In the past week, a study on face masks for preventing Covid-19, was widely shared by many MD, PhD, MD/MPHs, and MD/PhDs since it proved they were correct: Face masks work to stop the spread of Covid.

Except the study was utter garbage with some many fatal errors there are too many to list even here on the blog. Read the above to see how bad this study is.

Another study on masks came out this week and is also widely shared by “experts” on social media. This one claimed that schools in Massachusetts that did not have mask guidelines had higher case rates for Covid than schools that did not.

But this study, too had a major flaw: the schools, per policy, only tested students who were unmasked and did not test students who wore masks, making the results of the study, useless. The authors claimed that periodically sampling of other students corrected for this problem, however, since the differences were small, it is very unlikely this sampling caught sufficient samples.

It is appalling that people conduct such flawed studies, wasting taxpayer money on studies that are worthless. It is also appalling that many “experts” fall for these studies and share them widely on social media. As I have said before, social media is an amplifier of propaganda messaging that starts elsewhere (typically).

Seeing this unfold the past 2 1/2 years, I have lost confidence in public health, epidemiology and most fields of science. Science has not lived up to the high standards we were once taught existed in the fields. For me, Science no longer gets a free pass on believability; I now assume anything I see is false until I have been able to review the actual paper or papers.