The current COVID-19 surge highlights the value of masks and vaccines. But research that falsely casts doubt on such protections sometimes still makes it into print.
Recently, America's oldest and most widely cited journal of pediatrics retracted one such paper.
Just over two weeks ago, JAMA Pediatrics published a paper claiming children's face masks trap enough carbon dioxide to cause "impairments."
In their retraction, the editors criticized the conclusions of lead author Harald Walach and his colleagues and questioned the means by which they measured CO2 concentrations.
A few days later, the journal Vaccines retracted another Walach paper that claimed COVID-19 vaccines caused two deaths for every three they prevented.
The data the authors used in that paper did not contain a causal link between reported deaths and vaccinations but was misinterpreted to imply one existed.
JAMA Pediatrics is published by the American Medical Association and reports that it receives more than 6.7 million annual article views and downloads.
