How the covid-19 pandemic has led to a flood of misleading science

Amid the global coronavirus outbreak, a second epidemic of preliminary, unverified and misinterpreted research has broken out. Can it be fixed?

By Graham Lawton

Paul Ellis/Afp Via Getty Images

SOME people describe it as “havoc”, others as “a recipe for disaster”. Not the effect of the coronavirus on healthcare or the economy, but on something even more fundamental to defeating it: science.

Since the pandemic began, thousands of studies related to it have been published. “The research community has mobilised in the face of the pandemic in an unprecedented way,” says John Inglis at academic publisher Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York.

But in the race to understand the coronavirus, and …