Fake Study Linking Pokemon to Covid Cited at Least Once

Another reminder as to why you should never take 'scientific facts' as fact or absolute truth. Always, always go back and double check the original source. Use critical thinking and try and find multiple sources, replicated studies etc.

www.the-scientist.com...

On March 18, 2020, the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research published my paper claiming that eating a bat-like Pokémon sparked the spread of COVID-19. This paper, “Cyllage City COVID-19 outbreak linked to Zubat consumption,” blames a fictional creature for an outbreak in a fictional city, cites fictional references (including one from author Bruce Wayne in Gotham Forensics Quarterly on using bats to fight crime), and is cowritten by fictional authors such as Pokémon’s Nurse Joy and House, MD. Nonetheless, four days after submission, editor Catherine Nichols was “cheerful to inform” me via email that it had “received positive review comments” and was accepted for publication.

To make matters worse, my Pokémon-inspired paper on the novel coronavirus has already been cited. A physicist based in Tunisia published “The COVID-19 outbreak’s multiple effects,” which claimed that COVID-19 was human-made and is treatable with “provincial herbs,” in another predatory journal, The International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology. He not only cited my article, but also cited one of my made-up references, “Signs and symptoms of Pokérus infection,” as the paper that first identified SARS-CoV-2.

So far, more than 30 articles on COVID-19 have been retracted.

How many of those retracted or just outright false articles were picked up by the news, touted as fact and have been guiding public policy?

a reply to: dug88

Probably all of the articles; since the same handful of people that released it (theoretically or not), are the same handful of people that own all of the main media outlets.

Both funny and sad.

I'd be more worried about the articles that aren't retracted though. Where it isn't all that obvious that the numbers or results of a RCT for example were skewered in a particular direction to paint a false picture of the situation, such as the Recovery study concerning HCQ (setup to make it look like HCQ doesn't work, including tricks such as overdosing and stopping the treatment or part of a proper HCQ treatment too soon, such as stopping with Azithromycin after 5 days when the patient is still in the hospital, rushing HCQ patients onto intubation/ventilators, withholding other elements of quality care to HCQ patients in the trial, such as zinc, high dose vitamin C and D3, close patient monitoring and analysis, escalation with the right corticosteroid if needed or warranted, which probably isn't dexamethasone, see table 2 in the study linked there that compares 4 corticosteroids and where dexamethasone is the 2nd worst and has a negative impact on fatality rate compared to not getting that drug. Prednisone is the only steroid with a beneficial result in that study); which still hasn't been retracted.

RCT = randomized controlled trial (which are just as open to this sort of manipulation as any other type of study, therefore, it says very little about the quality and reliability of the study whether or not it's a RCT, making it misleading to refer to all RCT's as the gold standard for medical research. Compared to RCT's done by unreliable parties, case studies by honest physicians actually trying to help their patients rather than proving a point that was decided on beforehand as in the case of some RCT's concerning HCQ, such as the Recovery study and the Lancet study that was retracted, are far superior; the honest case studies that is. And with case studies, you have a much higher chance of the honesty of the physician doing the case studies, than with a whole team of researchers working on a government/bureaucracy funded and/or approved RCT*)

*: Case in point:

Hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid 19 Case Studies for Doctors pt1 Doc Talk with Dr Ban Ep.26 (playlist)

originally posted by: SeektoUnderstand
Probably all of the articles; since the same handful of people that released it (theoretically or not), are the same handful of people that own all of the main media outlets.

Even scarier is the number of people that will read these articles and actually believe it