As of 5 March 2024, a search of PubMed for “COVID-19” yields over 400,000 publications and the true number of scholarly articles, which dealt with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and were published in the last four years, might well be much higher. Unfortunately, many studies that influenced health policy-making and public opinion are flawed, as the peer review process was compromised by biased reviews and editorial decisions, and dissenting academics were silenced as a consequence.
Based on the personal experience of several RECOVER19 investigators with this censorship as well as with writing letters, comments, and responses to published articles, we are piloting the Covid-19 Science Observatory, or short CS Observatory. The goal of this initiative is nothing less than to correct the record of the peer-reviewed literature by making corrections to published articles about the pandemic more readily available to policy-makers and the public, and by encouraging further corrections to be written.
The observatory consists of a data table with records of articles, comments, letters, blog posts, and other types of responses with online links and information on the authors, policy area, methods or issues, and key conclusions. The underlying spreadsheet can be collaboratively edited and could in the future be used to coordinate responses among critical researchers and groups.
Without further ado, have a look at the CS Observatory, which now appears in your browser as a Google Site with an Apps Script deployment running in the background. It should look something like the following screenshot.
RECOVER19 