Many scientists citing two scandalous Covid-19 papers ignore their retractions

Of course you could implement those systems, but they’d be costly either in terms of further centralizing the peer review process behind companies like Elsevier or taking critical human time away from reviewing the actual results. And the benefits if you implemented these review systems might be highly limited, plus you’d probably run into a host of additional problems.

On the “highly limited” side, many papers have a related work section that doesn’t list primary results that are relevant to the paper’s findings, but instead mainly serves as a reference guide. You might be writing a paper on (here I’m making up silly analogies) LED light bulbs, and you’d have a set of references that begins with “a line of work looks at incandescent light bulbs”. An accidental citation to a retracted work there is sloppy, but mostly scientifically irrelevant when no result in the paper actually refers to anything in those citations (which is why these citations slip by manual reviewers, who focus their valuable review time on citations that affect the scientific results in the paper.)

You also have the more annoying problem that citation formats aren’t standardized, so it’s easy for a retracted paper to be cited in a format that an automated review system will miss. Google Scholar throws all the might of Google’s systems at this, and still treats the preprint version and conference version of my papers as different works. (This might be the right treatment or it might be the wrong one, but it’s murder on retraction scanners if the author cites the preprint.) Plus then there’s the additional burden of dealing with unimportant retractions that are issued after a paper that cites them has been published, which should be addressed but largely just cause annoying work for scientists and publishers and (as the article notes) are aggravating because it’s difficult for readers to distinguish a minor correction regarding an unimportant reference from a major one that affects the findings of the work.

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.

It's my nature.