THE LANCET: ACTIVISM BEFORE ACCURACY

Posted on The Lancet Global Health Network on 2 March 2009:

We have taken down the blog post "The wounds of Gaza" because of factual inaccuracies. We would like to point out that our editorial decision process to post blog entries (and their comments) on The Lancet Global Health Network is very different from our rigorous peer review process in The Lancet and TheLancet.com. We want to encourage debate and we see The Lancet Global Health Network as a good forum to do this. We do not endorse any particular side of a debate and so post a range of views and comments.

The truly atrocious The wounds of Gaza was posted on 2 February 2009 with various commenters quickly pointing out obvious errors. These were ignored with the post remaining online for a month. Given that this post was published at all, the Lancet's "editorial decision process" is again shown to be highly suspect.

Update: A rebuttal published by the Lancet on 18 February 2009.