JESSE SINGAL: If The New England Journal Of Medicine Doesn’t Correct This Error, You Cannot Trust Anything It Publishes.

Back when I wrote about that white paper, I was disturbed not only by the fact that Yale Law School published and promoted such propaganda-posing-as-science on its website, but also by what happened next. Despite the fact that critics (myself included) pointed out numerous errors and distortions in the paper, some of them of a straightforward factual nature, none of the authors — Meredithe McNamara, Kellan Baker, Kara Connelly, Aron Janssen, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, Ken C. Pang, Ayden Scheim, Jack Turban, and Anne Alstott — took their names off the paper or pushed for a correction. They failed to clear the lowest bar imaginable for a public intellectual, in other words. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but if a researcher is willing to affix their name to a claim that they know is false — and I specifically emailed Alstott, Olson-Kennedy, and Jannsen about this — then what won’t they do to further whatever causes they think are righteous? If someone is openly willing to lie, it should call into question everything that comes out of their mouth.

The same thing applies to publications, from the lowliest tabloids to the most celebrated medical journals. And I think The New England Journal of Medicine is about to put itself into that camp.

Not unlikely.