With so many epidemiology papers published each month, everyone in a giant academic industry essentially created by Harvard School of Public Health in the 1980s is pushing out "correlation" between some common food or chemical and some disease or health benefit, it is hard to get noticed.
One way corporate journalists will notice is if a Republican says it. A WHO "miracle drug" was dragged through the mud for suggesting it might be a therapy for COVID-19 - after a Republican listed that peer-reviewed research.
Immediately, the progressive wolves circled and tore the paper to shreds - without noting that same terrible methodology had been used in 9,000 epidemiology papers that year. And every increasingly ridiculous claim by France's International Agency for Research on Cancer (diet soda causes cancer! Plants are little people! Tea causes cancer!) uses methodology even worse.
A claim that hearing aids "increased risk" of dementia - which means scholars are strongly suggesting causation while always being certain to deny they are suggesting causation way down near the bottom - was so ridiculous I didn't even bother with it. But it is a big business, hearing aids provide a tremendous value for those with hearing difficulties and their families. I didn't shred it but others did, and it turned out to be the most common error that people who are not experts in statistics make when they write papers about statistics - they got it wrong. In this case, formatting.
To their credit, when others noted their error, and that all of their conclusions were not valid based on that, they retracted their paper. Which means they are more ethical than Tyrone Hayes, Chuck Benbrook, Gilles-Eric Seralini, Phil Landrigan, plus True Health Initiative activists like Walter Willett and Frank Hu - combined.
