[Goose]

The authors need to publicly and loudly retract the preprint and admit their errors.  It's painful to see Stanford's name dragged through the mud, but it's not too late to avoid the worst damage.

No, I could not disagree more.  If every methodologically imperfect study was retracted, the medical literature would never advance.  In fact, there would be no medical literature.  Unless the authors are downright falsifying their data, they should not retract it.  Hopefully, they are addressing criticisms of their work and are working to address them and they are working to make the data and underlying methodology more transparent (and also, undergoing the peer review process).  But science only works if you accept that some "wrong" articles are published.  For one, sometimes the results of methodologically flawed papers are confirmed through more rigorous analysis.  Secondly, the scientific debate is healthy.  But it can only work if scientific papers are evaluated on their merit, and not because someone doesn't like their conclusions.  Does the paper have flaws?  Absolutely.  Have I seen papers with worse flaws get published in high impact journals?  Absolutely.  The paper helps us better understand the pandemic and as such it should absolutely be out there, even if the message challenges our understanding of the facts and there may be issues in how it was carried out.

BC

I totally agree that this paper, warts and all, needs to be made public. There isn't tons of other data out there, so we need to take what there is, if for no other reason than to identify problems in this study. Maybe there is more to it than that and the "reviewers comments" can be addressed, at least to some degree. If not, at least in can serve as an example of how not to do it.

[Goose]

The authors need to publicly and loudly retract the preprint and admit their errors.  It's painful to see Stanford's name dragged through the mud, but it's not too late to avoid the worst damage.

No, I could not disagree more.  If every methodologically imperfect study was retracted, the medical literature would never advance.  In fact, there would be no medical literature.  Unless the authors are downright falsifying their data, they should not retract it.  Hopefully, they are addressing criticisms of their work and are working to address them and they are working to make the data and underlying methodology more transparent (and also, undergoing the peer review process).  But science only works if you accept that some "wrong" articles are published.  For one, sometimes the results of methodologically flawed papers are confirmed through more rigorous analysis.  Secondly, the scientific debate is healthy.  But it can only work if scientific papers are evaluated on their merit, and not because someone doesn't like their conclusions.  Does the paper have flaws?  Absolutely.  Have I seen papers with worse flaws get published in high impact journals?  Absolutely.  The paper helps us better understand the pandemic and as such it should absolutely be out there, even if the message challenges our understanding of the facts and there may be issues in how it was carried out.

BC

I totally agree that this paper, warts and all, needs to be made public. There isn't tons of other data out there, so we need to take what there is, if for no other reason than to identify problems in this study. Maybe there is more to it than that and the "reviewers comments" can be addressed, at least to some degree. If not, at least in can serve as an example of how not to do it.