Flutterby™! : BMC Infectious Diseases and the peer review process

Chronicle of Higher Education: This Questionable Study Caught Fire in Anti-Vaccine Circles. How Did It Get Through Peer Review? (requires registration)

“The maintenance of scientific integrity in journals — the correction and retraction process — is fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with the pandemic,” said Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist and Ph.D. student at the University of Wollongong, in Australia. Having dug into dozens of shoddy Covid studies, he called the soon-to-be-retracted paper “among the worst things I’ve ever seen published.”

The Chronicle article is mostly about the peer review process and the failures in that. David Gorski has a more complete takedown of the paper itself: Economist Mark Skidmore publishes antivax propaganda disguised as a survey.