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Notes -
I will caveat that this defense doesn't seem particularly workable, here. As JamesClaims points out, "the problems with the original DECREASE study were reasonably straightforward to detect." Some of the testimony in the final report_also_ points to errors that would have been hard to spot without access to the underlying data (though "The principal investigator checked the work of the PhD candidate at random and never noticed anything unusual." seems... pretty clearly just a lie?), but this summary is a lot more to the heart of things.
These are results that, just from the final papers themselves, range from wildly implausible statistics to GRIM errors to confusing entirely different drugs. This is the sort of thing that should have resulted in deeper scrutiny.
I'm not quite willing to sign onto JamesClaims' "strict liability" approach yet, but I don't think you need to in order to look at this one and suspect either wilful blindness at best by the principal authors.
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