[fastaguy88]

Re self-correcting science. In the area I am most familiar with (basic life sciences), correction happens pretty quickly. But I don’t worry about public policy much.

But I’m comfortable arguing that where science intersects with policy, fraud plays a very minor role. I suspect that most policy “mistakes” (policies that were adopted and then reversed) are more about the need for a policy in the absence of data (covid and masks), or subtle tradeoffs (covid and masks), or a policy choice that seems slightly better than an alternative (mammography) but also has poorly understood harms. Policy involves politics, and science unfortunately plays less of a role than one might like (and fraudulent science an even smaller role). This is not my field, but I cannot think of policies that were reversed because of discoveries of fraud (perhaps thalidomide and other drug approvals).