Retraction Watch points to this fun article by Ashley Rindsberg, “The Lancet was made for political activism,” subtitled, For 200 years, it has thrived on melodrama and scandal.
And they didn’t even mention Surgisphere (for more detail, see here) or this story (the PACE study) or this one about gun control.
All journals publish bad papers; we notice Lancet’s more because they get more publicity.
Not to go to bat that much for the Lancet, but was this article really written in good faith? It reads like an “anti-woke” hatchet job with some winks at anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
Quentin:
I didn’t catch the anti-vaccine stuff. The most notorious thing that Lancet ever did was publish that anti-vaccine article by Wakefield, and the second most notorious thing they ever did was to wait over a decade before retracting it.
China-bashing adjacent as well.
I’ve seen some pretty good stuff from Unherd but I don’t think it merits benefit of the doubt and should always be given a high level of scrutiny. They’ve put out a lot of crap.
Maybe not anti-vaccine per se, but I certainly got the vibe from the article that “MSM (including Lancet) is trying to hide the truth about the Covid lab leak” and that kind of thing …