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As usual, I agree with everything you said. I have started, and never finished, writing an article addressing the very first part of what you discuss here--the push to sensationalize your results in order to gain funding. I had to explain to so many non-scientists that the term "novel" (in the COVID context we heard- "it's a NOVEL virus") is one of the most overused words in the scientific lexicon. It constitutes an entire section of the scoring rubric on any grant (i.e., INNOVATION). It motivates people to distort the novelty of what they are studying, and the SIGNIFICANCE section of that scoring rubric motivates people to exaggerate something like the severity of a disease they are studying. I think academic scientists are so used to overplaying significance and novelty of diseases and treatments that they lapped up the various COVID narratives without actually taking a step back to think about it.

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