"Egregiously false": Researchers rip medical journals over COVID

Three and a half years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, American medical journals are still calling out what they consider commonly shared misinformation on vaccines, masks, transmission and viral origins, sometimes promoted by health professionals.

Yet voluminous research and real-world experiences over that span suggest the journals themselves are promoting outdated, unsupported or exaggerated COVID claims, if not outright misinformation.

COVID researchers around the world piled on a Journal of the American Medical Association publication for running a University of Massachusetts Amherst study of physicians with large online followings who shared purported misinformation, including that COVID could have leaked from a lab.

The Aug. 15 JAMA Network Open study “should be retracted” for its “egregiously false claims,” University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Tracy Beth Hoeg wrote in a lengthy thread on X, formerly known as Twitter. “It’s an embarrassment to our profession.”