The Crisis of Fake Science: It’s Not Just the Shysters Anymore, By Professor X

For two years now, any teenager with an internet connection can spin up a 25-page "study" complete with the stats, such as p-values, confidence intervals, Kaplan-Meier curves, and 87 citations that "proves" eating waffles causes baldness or that fake meat triggers autism. The footnotes look impeccable. The journal name is forged perfectly. Most readers (including many PhDs) won't spot the fraud until they try and fail to locate the original papers or notice that the dataset has more Brazilian participants than Brazil has people.

We used to think the main threat was obvious grifters: predatory journals, paper mills in China charging $2,000 per authorship, or ideologues faking data for a cause. Those still exist. But the deeper rot is now inside the citadel itself. When The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (institutions that once treated a retraction like a funeral) have to pull high-profile COVID papers years after publication, when a multi-million-dollar trial funded by a now-convicted fraudster becomes the basis for global drug policy, we are no longer dealing with fringe charlatans. We are watching the mainstream scientific enterprise haemorrhage credibility in real time.

The TOGETHER trial is the latest exhibit. Published in 2022, cited everywhere, used to bury ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, funded partly by parties with glaring conflicts of interest, and now (as of last week) formally retracted in at least one major venue with others likely to follow. This wasn't some obscure pay-to-play outlet. This was the establishment telling pharmacies to refuse doctor prescriptions because "the science" had spoken.

And pharmacies did refuse. Doctors were threatened with license revocation. People died waiting for treatments that parts of the world (India, Mexico, much of Africa) used routinely and successfully while our regulators treated randomized trials like papal bulls. The same institutions that once demanded we "trust the experts" now ask us to believe the next batch will be different.

Meanwhile the retraction wave keeps swelling. Over 10,000 papers were pulled in 2023 alone; 2024 and 2025 are on pace to surpass that. Many are COVID-related, but not all. Image manipulation, statistical impossible results, impossible patient recruitment speeds, authors who don't exist; the scandals read like a crime blotter. The sleazy paper mills are still there, but increasingly the fraud is coming from inside the house: prestigious universities, well-funded labs, household-name researchers.

Artificial intelligence is the accelerant thrown on this fire. Where it once took weeks to fake a plausible dataset, it now takes seconds. Where it once required a team to forge citations, one prompt now generates a bibliography that survives cursory checks. The pranksters who tried to get health-freedom advocates on camera endorsing a fabricated "fake-meat-causes-autism" study weren't the scandal; the scandal is that they almost succeeded because the format was indistinguishable from the real thing.

We have built a system that runs on trust but no longer deserves it. Peer review has become a polite fiction; most reviewers spend less than an hour on a manuscript. Replication is unfunded and career suicide. Negative results are buried. Journals compete for splashy headlines, not quiet truth. And the public, exhausted from being told to "follow the science" while the science flip-flopped on masks, lockdowns, natural immunity, and early treatment, has simply stopped listening.

This is not a PR problem. This is an epistemological crisis.

The scientific revolution replaced one priesthood (the Church) with another (white-coated experts speaking in stats p-values). When that new priesthood is revealed to be as fallible, as corruptible, and sometimes as ideological as the old one; people don't become more scientific; they become nihilists. Or they retreat to older forms of authority: personal experience, traditional wisdom, or raw tribal signalling ("my side's experts vs your side's experts").

There is, however, one branch of knowledge that has never suffered this crisis of legitimacy: mathematics and deductive systems like Euclidean geometry. No one doubts the Pythagorean theorem because no one needs to trust a priest or a professor; the proof is in the pudding and the pudding is self-evident. You can verify it yourself with a rope and three sticks. Logic is democratic in a way empirical science, by its nature, can never be.

We don't know what comes next. Decentralised science funded by crypto and judged by prediction markets? Open-data mandates with cryptographic verification? A return to smaller, slower, more humble science that admits uncertainty instead of issuing Olympian pronouncements? Whatever it is, the old regime (centralised, credentialist, "trust us, we're the experts") is dying in front of our eyes.

Until something better replaces it, be sceptical. Check primary sources. Demand raw data. And maybe (just to be safe) switch to blueberries. Your hair will thank you!

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-problem-of-fake-science-5945846