Our economy, said John Maynard Keynes in 1933, “is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t […]
Columnists
Matt Morgan: Changing global medical practice through a press release has put EBM into ICU
Releasing the results of the Recovery trial quickly, may have saved lives. But without the data available yet, the results cannot be scrutinised. Matt Morgan considers this complex decision […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Withdrawn
Correction added 24 June 2020: The original hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin preprint paper mentioned in this article can still be viewed at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.05.20088757v1?versioned=true Some articles get retracted. Some get withdrawn. […]
David Oliver: The UK government’s pandemic response has been economical with the truth
Much of the rhetoric on the coronavirus pandemic has drawn on battlefield metaphors. Perhaps the notion that truth is the first casualty of war also applies to our government’s response […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Benefits, harms, and three tales of retractions
Here are three tales of retractions and a puzzle. A tale of apparent benefit In a tweet on 16 April, the prolific Professor Mandeep R Mehra, whose 2020 PubMed record […]
Richard Smith: A collection of consistently hilarious (but also pointed) columns from The BMJ
Jim Drife, the singing professor of obstetrics and gynaecology from Leeds, wrote a hilarious, teasing column in The BMJ over many years. His columns have now been collected together in […]
Richard Smith: How can we achieve a healthy recovery from the pandemic?
I recently saw a cartoon that has uncomfortably embedded itself in my brain: it shows a relatively small tidal wave that is the pandemic, followed by a bigger tidal wave […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Retraction
The retraction yesterday of two publications, one in The Lancet and one in the New England Journal of Medicine, reflects a current major problem with research into the management of […]
There is no stopping covid-19 without stopping racism
We urge all physicians and public health experts to take a firm stance against racism […]
Peter Brindley: Covid-19—and now what?
A single coronavirus weighs less than one attogram (which is 10 to the power minus 18 grams). If 50-70 billion coronaviruses are needed to make a human sick, then we’re […]