It’s All Fake…

With so much Iran news, I have kept this story on the back burner. 

But man cannot live by Iran alone, as they say, and this story shouldn’t be shunted to the background just because it is not the shiniest object at the moment. And the “trust the science” people should have to explain why we should anymore. 

This is what happened with Covid. Higher credentialed ppl would be promoted saying “bleach your mail” or “wipe down your groceries w bleach wipes” and when questioned they’d say “it’s okay if it’s not true that’s what ppl need to hear right now” — crazy

— tetheredtoed (@tetheredtoed1) March 4, 2026

This story is remarkable. A Canadian medical journal on pediatrics has been publishing fictional stories for decades for medical education, without bothering to tell anyone that the cases were entirely made up. 

Here’s the @NewYorker story that started this ball rolling https://t.co/gWXfdFRTHH

— David Juurlink (@DavidJuurlink) March 4, 2026

It’s not just any journal, either. It is the official journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, and the case studies have been cited in research, have helped shape practice based on shoddy research that has been disproved, and have even been used in court cases. 

A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional.

Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, has published the cases since 2000 in articles for a series for its Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP. The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional.

The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up. 

“Based on the New Yorker article, we made the decision to add a correction notice to all 138 publications drawing attention to CPSP studies and surveys to clarify that the cases are fictional,” Joan Robinson, editor-in-chief of Paediatrics & Child Health, told Retraction Watch. “From now on, the body of the case report will specifically state that the case is fictional.” 

The move came as a surprise to David Juurlink, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto, who has spent over a decade looking into the claim that infants can receive a meaningful or even lethal dose of opioids via breast milk when their mothers take acetaminophen with codeine. The first such case, published in the Lancet in 2006 by pharmacologist Gideon Koren, was the centerpiece of the New Yorker article. (The Lancet case report now bears an expression of concern.) Koren used that case to claim for years that codeine, which gets metabolized to morphine in the body, can pose a lethal risk to breastfeeding infants.

You read that right: this prestigious journal was presenting as if they were real, for the purpose of educating physicians, articles about cases that were completely made up. 

It’s breathtaking. And, apparently, this is the state of prestige medicine. If you don’t have the actual evidence to make your preferred case, just make it up and get it published in a top journal. What could be better? You don’t even have to do the messy work of gathering evidence. Fiction is cheaper, easier, and more effective. 

The Baby boy blue case is “the only such case study, aside from the Lancet case report and the two now-retracted descriptions of the same case in Canadian Family Physician and Canadian Pharmacists Journal,” Juurlink said. “It is the most compelling published description of neonatal opioid toxicity from breastfeeding. And it is wrong.”

Juurlink said he doesn’t think a correction is sufficient for this case in particular. “The paper should obviously be retracted,” he told us. “It’s a fictional case portrayed as real and its scientific underpinnings have collapsed, yet it perpetuates them.”

Five years ago, you would have been shocked to discover that a medical journal had conspired to publish fraudulent papers on which to base medical practice, but after the COVID years, it appears that this is usual practice. Paper after paper has been retracted in recent years for presenting fraudulent evidence, recommendations that have changed the lives of billions of people—very much for the worse in the case of COVID—were known to be fiction, and the entire research architecture for the study of Alzheimer’s Disease was based on fraud. 

Scientific fraud in pursuit of the amyloid hypothesis in Alzheimer’s https://t.co/cyB7lAStaS

— Dr. Jason Fung (@drjasonfung) June 5, 2024

Medical research is not entirely corrupt, of course, but separating the wheat from the chaff is becoming almost impossible because there is what amounts to an organized crime ring, abetted by prestigious medical journals and a lot of third-rate journals published by prestigious scientific publishers. 

Organized scientific fraud is growing at an alarming rate, study uncovers | Northwestern University

From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise, according to a new Northwestern University study.

By combining large-scale… pic.twitter.com/pzwkS3C39c

— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) August 6, 2025

Organized scientific fraud is growing at an alarming rate, study uncovers | Northwestern University

From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise, according to a new Northwestern University study.

By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, the researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and entities, which systematically work together to undermine the integrity of academic publishing.

The problem is so widespread that the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications. The authors argue these findings should serve as a wake-up call to the scientific community, which needs to act before the public loses confidence in the scientific process.

The study, “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient and growing rapidly,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Science must police itself better in order to preserve its integrity,” said Northwestern’s Luís A. N. Amaral, the study’s senior author.

It should be a massive scandal covered by even mainstream media outlets. After all, the whole point of presenting these papers is to shape medical practice, and the use of case studies is intended to maximize the impact of these reports. 

But that would violate The Narrative. 

The two corrections in Paediatrics & Child Health, which is published by Oxford University Press, cover two different names for the series that included case descriptions. Published February 23, each correction lists all the relevant DOIs and a note stating, “Every clinical vignette presented within the journal’s [CPSP Highlights section or Surveillance Highlights section] describes a fictional case, created as a teaching tool and related to a Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program study or survey.”

The journal also submits the full text of its articles to PubMed Central, including the case studies. The versions on PubMed Central also do not bear any indication the case reports are fictional.

The surveillance highlights “are intended for paediatric health care providers or physicians in training, and include learning points that briefly translate and disseminate knowledge about the disease or condition,” Elizabeth Moreau, a spokesperson for the Canadian Paediatric Society, told us by email. 

We are told, constantly, that there is a war against The Science™, but the fact is that much of The Science™, especially anything aimed at influencing practice and public policy, or that touches on the ability to suck in massive amounts of research dollars, is bunk. 

Most academic frauds aren’t sophisticated masterminds. These guys were publishing totally fabricated case studies for a quarter of a century until Juurlink bothered to ask “Wait is this actually true?” and the author just said “Nope”. https://t.co/jZei89bABk pic.twitter.com/LNT0uj8I8v

— Ben Landau-Taylor (@benlandautaylor) March 4, 2026

That is devastating. Because obviously it matters quite a lot. Climate policies are based on The Science™, much of which is bunk, and Western countries are groaning under the strain of pursuing policies that are based on the shakiest of foundations, and of course, every time we go to the doctor, we are evaluated and treated based on The Science™. 

How much of it is fiction? How can we tell? Does anybody care anymore, or is the scientific establishment so twisted by the need to grab government money, please bureaucrats, or push a political agenda that they have abandoned every principle upon which public trust is based?

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