New York Times Blasted for Citing ‘Unpublished Research’ Inciting Fear About New COVID Variant
After other media outlets picked up the New York Times article about a “worrisome” new virus variant allegedly spreading throughout the city, scientists and health officials blasted the paper for inciting fear based on unpublished, non-peer-reviewed studies.
The New York Times on Thursday published an article about the spread of a possible new COVID variant in New York City. After the article was picked up widely by other mainstream media outlets, scientists and public health officials were quick to condemn what they said was the “potentially premature release of unfinished research.”
The Times cited studies from two teams of researchers. One study, posted online Tuesday, was led by a group of researchers at the California Institute of Technology. The other study, which had been obtained by the Times but not yet made public, came from a group of researchers at Columbia University.
Neither study had been peer reviewed, published in a scientific journal or shared with public officials before being published by the Times, according to NBC New York.
CNN, which also received a copy of the Columbia study, ran with the Times’ story that researchers had found a worrying new variant in New York City that was “alarming,” “surging” and might be “more contagious” and cause more “severe disease.”
CNN did admit that the research was in its very early stages, had not been published or peer reviewed and needed “more work.”
“To be quite clear, I think neither of us did anything wrong,” said the author of the article, Apoorva Mandavilli, in a tweet. “It is our job to report and bring information to light. Sometimes that’s at the pace of science, but sometimes not.”
However, scientists and health officials criticized the premature release of unfinished research, arguing that there was no evidence that the new variant has contributed to the case trajectory and that it was not currently a cause for public health concern.
Commenting on the controversy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman of Children’s Health Defense, said:
“This is yet another example of the New York Times’ double standard and hypocrisy on all things vaccine. The Times regularly bashes me for promoting vaccine ‘misinformation’ even though I religiously cite all of my published posts to published, peer-reviewed sources or government databases. Yet here we have the Times promoting panic by citing an article that is neither peer reviewed nor published and that has none of the indicia of accuracy or credibility.”
When Eric Topol, physician, scientist, professor of molecular medicine and founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute asked on Twitter why academic groups were forwarding “preprints” that are not posted directly to the media without the biomedical community having a chance to review, Nathan Grubaugh, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health responded:
“This wasn’t even a ‘pre-print’ – I was asked to provide comment on someone’s draft manuscript that still had tracked changes and didn’t include the figures. Based on this, the NYT wrote a story. This is an absolute mess.”
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/new-york-times-unpublished-research-covid-variant/