Day 130: Retractions

Well, you know the moment the WHO says anything for the sake of science rather than China, it's going to get retracted, but they usually don't operate at the whiplash-inducing speed PlagueBlog has experienced in the last 24 hours. Axios reports that the WHO has already "walked back" yesterday's comments that asymptomatic spread is "very rare". Of course they can't call back the evidence that asymptomatic spread is very rare, but they can wring their hands about a lack of clarity in comments that were pretty clear about the difference between asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread, etc., etc.

Also on the retraction front, a couple of published papers and a preprint were retracted last week due to reliance on a proprietary data set from Surgisphere. The studies' conclusions included that ivermectin was effective against coronavirus, that hydroxychloroquine was dangerous to use on COVID-19 patients, and that ACE inhibitors were safe to use. This seems to be a bit of a tempest in a teapot; the issues of validating anonymized data are nowhere near the heart of the problems of peer review and reproducibility of science in normal times, never mind during a panic pandemic.

The saddest retraction of all, however, is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' stealthy postponement of bar reopenings from Phase 3 to Phase 4, "which the administration has said will require a vaccine or effective treatment for COVID-19." Or in other words, until the lawsuit.

To be honest, there are not a lot of bars here that don't serve some kind of food (and thus probably still qualify for Phase 2 or 3), though it's unclear from the news reporting how much food service turns a bar from a forbidden nightclub back into a permitted restaurant. Cases are up a quarter of a percentage point in Massachusetts today, so I guess we need to suddenly panic about the occasional food-free bar.