If as many as three-quarters (75%) of researchers may be using questionable research practices. And fourteen per cent of may simply fabricate their data then what does it mean? What it means is that we are in a very dark place indeed. Can we believe anything at all. And I mean at all .

In addition, if major medical journals, and their peer-reviewers, are unable pick-up research fraud. Then what, exactly, is the point of them. To quote Richard Horton again (sic) half of what is in them is may simply be untrue ... ‘ Which half, please. Oh, you don’t know. ’

Creating a test that misses the diagnosis (poor sensitivity) is bad. But creating a test with a high false positive rate (poor specificity) can be worse. Especially if, like me, you are trying to work out who did, and who did not, die of Covid-19.

Someone could arrive in hospital with a condition that had nothing to do with Covid. However, if they had a positive test on admission, and then died within twenty-eight days – from the condition that had nothing to do with Covid – they would be added to the Covid-19 death statistics.

‘If you search for scientific research articles with COVID -19 in the title, you’ll see more than 17,000 articles published since the start of 2020, but this vital research is being undermined by weak or even fraudulent research practices. Perhaps the highest profile example so far is the Surgisphere case which saw a small US company seemingly... See more

And the dread Covid-19 counter, which they kept showing on the news, night after night,l clicked over by one. Another ‘scary’ Covid-19 death ...that had nothing to do with the virus.

In the month of January 2022 alone, ninety-one million tests were done in the UK. If false positives were running at 2% (it could well have been more), then we will have resulted in nearly two million Covid-19 diagnoses. In people who did not have the disease.

Richard Smith was editor of the British Medical Journal for many years. His view:

The poor quality of medical research is widely acknowledged, yet disturbingly the leaders of the medical profession seem only minimally concerned about the problems and make no apparent efforts to find a solution. ’

He noticed, I noticed a long time ago. It would be... See more

‘ Was the Surgisphere case a one-off? Or does it highlight the bigger systemic problem of research fraud ?’