The biggest scandal so far: a retraction paper for the SARS-CoV-19 PCR test was submitted in November 2020 but ignored so far. The retraction paper is here:
https://cormandrostenreview.com/report/
Drosten, Corman et al. from the Charité (among Europe's largest and most reputable university hospitals and medical schools) published a paper [1] in January 2020 [2] in the "Eurosurveillance Journal" in which they described a diagnostic workflow to detect SARS-CoV-2 (not "SARS-CoV-19", as you say) which they had developed and tested (both sensitivity and specificity). That became known as the Drosten PCR, and was the standard procedure initially to detect the virus (at least in Germany).
A group of 22 nutcases with bad English claim that the Drosten/Corman paper is severely flawed, put up a "report" "refuting" it (on a website, not published) and demand that Eurosurveillance retract it.
That report (which highlights a few very minor actual issues, but is otherwise false, misleading, and blown up entirely out of proportion) is later used by covidiots to claim that PCR testing is flawed and full of false positives, the virus doesn't exist, and further nonsense.
Needless to say, there are by now several different PCR testing protocols, they have been developed further, crosschecked, etc, and there is no major problem with PCR testing. Certainly no "big scandal".
This is political posturing and fabrication applied to medicine. Sad.
[1] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31992387/
[2] It was submitted January 21st 2020 and accepted for publication on January 22nd 2020. On January 23rd 2020 the paper was online.
However, I am saying that these guys are nutcases with bad English, and Drosten is an eminent expert on coronaviruses, and also the Drosten PCR has proven to be fine, and also the "report" the nutcases wrote has been largely refuted, by people that know much more about this than I do.
This article outlining the "Ad hominem fallacy fallacy" might be instructive.
https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html
> Put briefly, ad hominem is "You are an ignorant person, therefore your arguments are wrong", and not "Your arguments are wrong, therefore you are an ignorant person." The latter statement may be fallacious, but it's not an ad hominem fallacy.
It’s so odd that top level comment would be flagged.
The initial comment was rightfully flagged because it either ignores the bad and unscientific nature of the attacks on the paper.
It's a classic example of desperately trying to shoot the messengers and tboyd47 is correct to say it doesn't belong here. His post was flagged simply because he's another messenger and thus is getting shot - it obviously has nothing to do with the politeness or quality of his posts.
The reply actually addresses all the points.
* It provides an objective description of the test, supported by primary sources.
* Provides a description of the sources of criticism that were referred to in the initial statement.
* Describes the nature and quality of the criticism.
* Allows you to check that the papers under attack were not retracted, which is the testament to the scientific substance of said attacks.
* More importantly, raises the attention to the fact that there are far more test procedures nowadays which, even if we took the complains at face value, render them null.
There's a radical fringe which for some unexplained reason are both radically anti-science and heavily invested in trying to produce and use fraudulent pseudo-scientific work to attack scientific findings they find politically inconvenient, as a kind of Trojan horse based on appeals to authority.
Firstly, lack of retraction does not imply quality. I've read papers about COVID that were not merely wrong but deliberatively deceptive, and they haven't been retracted. Public health research just has a huge problem with bad papers, and it's not one they're admitting to.
Secondly, have you actually read the criticisms? A big part of it is that the Drosten protocol appears to have been published via a journal that he himself controls, hence the 24 hour submission-to-publication turnaround time. Obviously if that is true the paper will never be retracted, thus using lack of retraction as a way to attack the critics is circular; the non-independence of the publication path is itself a part of their criticism.
Thirdly, I read the criticism. A few things were indeed quibbly and didn't seem that important, others were not good but perhaps understandable if you make allowances for extreme speed. Other criticisms were highly substantive. But this may depend on your pre-existing value system. A critical problem with PCR testing is the way the people behind it appear to consider false positives either non-existent or entirely free: it's clear that everything about these testing programmes is designed to maximize positive results at all costs. They're terrified of false negatives but don't care about FPs at all. That isn't excusable.
Finally, w.r.t. "more test procedures", they all seem to have very similar reliability problems that are dismissed with circular logic of the form, "COVID is anyone who tests positive, therefore there are no false positives" or "A PCR positive means it detected RNA, and PCR is the most sensitive way to detect RNA, therefore if RNA is present you get a PCR positive, therefore the test works fine", all of which is entirely blind to the way it's being used in the real world.
There's a radical fringe which for some unexplained reason are both radically anti-science and heavily invested in trying to produce and use fraudulent pseudo-scientific work to attack scientific findings they find politically inconvenient, as a kind of Trojan horse based on appeals to authority
Yes, that fringe is called the public health establishment.
You should have contributed something to the conversation other than saying steelman.
I picked a randomish name (English based since there will be more English articles) from the signatures and found this
Dr. Kevin P. Corbett
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/who-were-the-so-calle...
I'll leave the translation up to the readers.
That former Pfizer guy apparently claimed in October that the coronavirus pandemic is “effectively over” in the United Kingdom. Clearly a man with special insights.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/dec/02/blog-posti...
(For the lazier, the technical discussion starts at the 12th tweet.)
The intent of the retraction seems to be to suggest that the epidemic is overblown, to which I would respond by pointing to the the two million dead people, and the excellent correlation of positive test results with new dead people.