Filed under: chain-gang,citation needed,metrics,poetic justice,unfinished draft
In the end, Elsevier retracted Kostoff’s anti-vax article, along with a pro-ivermectin study in the same issue that was similarly statistically-challenged. (It was that ivermectin study that led me to discover the issue in the first place, via scite.ai)
But not before his article dominated media and social media references to the Journal for months; and the author parlayed his peer-reviewed work into a DailyClout essay that was even more extreme, and did a tour on the social media anti-vax circuit. Thousands of people spent time debunking this nonsense, including a dozen on PubPeer alone. Millions of people saw references to it on social media.
The editor-in-chief who regularly published his own articles (or added himself as author to articles in his journal) stepped down as EIC, but continues to edit other toxicology journals and publish research at a healthy clip of three articles a month. Global understanding of COVID-19 is advancing steadily, with no further confusion or misdirection whatever. Everything is fine 🐶🔥