It must be true, because it’s published Science!
Seeing that a variety of opportunists, careless nimrods and woo-mongers have contaminated the scientific literature with dumbass papers on Covid-19 (32 retractions and counting), a group of intrepid sting artists decided to protest one of the latest dubious offerings by submitted their own paper to the journal in question (the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health).
The sting article is titled “SARS-CoV-2 was Unexpectedly Deadlier than Push-scooters: Could Hydroxychloroquine be the Unique Solution?” and was written by a distinguished panel of scientists, one of whom is identified in the author affiliations as a “General Practitioner and Independent Seeker of Science”. Another is billed as being on the staff of the "Institute for Quick and Dirty Science, Neunechatel, Switzerland.
The AJMH, which is not exactly one of the world’s most distinguished journals, accepted and published the paper but now (presumably red-faced) has retracted it for “fraud”.
It is a sad day, but somehow I find it difficult to stop laughing.
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/08/16/hydroxychloroquine-push-scooters-and-covid-19-a-journal-gets-stung-and-swiftly-retracts/?fbclid=IwAR1yALTjslLh7sn4TsQ4M1vB9Zz7wIfJYh7FjOcxThFVMQpNgnEjFowt2xk
I’ll have you know that being an accredited Independent Seeker of Science is one of the highest honors science can bestow! Even among the general public, who has not heard of the ISS?
And the Institute for Quick and Dirty Science is almost equally renowned among academics. The IQDS has been famous for many decades as a place where push-scooters have been intensively studied in real-world sidewalks and parks all over the world. In fact, over at IQDS, the empirical study of push-scooters is pretty much all they do, taking time out only for lunch, snacks, and nap time. The Jetson Jupiter Kick-Scooter with all the LEDs is their current favorite, and they keep getting into fights over it. They are currently seeking funding to get two or three of them.
The truth is, there are crappy journals all over the place, and it should not affect our faith in the good ones and the good science they represent. There is, for instance, Energy & Environment, which Wikipedia describes thusly:
"… The journal is regarded as ‘a small journal that caters to climate change denialists’. It has played an important role in attacking climate science and scientists … A 2005 article in Environmental Science & Technology stated that the journal is ‘obscure’ and that “scientific claims made in Energy & Environment have little credibility among scientists … When asked about the publication in the Spring of 2003 of a revised version of the paper at the center of the Soon and Baliunas controversy, [the editor] Boehmer-Christiansen said, ‘I’m following my political agenda – a bit, anyway. But isn’t that the right of the editor?’ … The journal has also been accused of publishing papers that could not have passed any reasonable peer review process, such as one in 2011 that claimed that the Sun was made of iron.”