Yes, scientific journals should publish political rebuttals

If they can.

The omicron variant and scicomm

Somewhere between the middle of India’s second major COVID-19 outbreak in March-May this year and today, a lot of us appear to have lost sight of a fact that was central to our understanding of COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020: that the only way a disease outbreak, especially of the novel coronavirus, can be truly devastating …

The great Nobel Prize hypocrisy

Katie Langin’s report for Science on October 12 is an eye-opening account of one reason why the committees that pick every year’s Nobel Prize winners almost never pick women: because they aren’t nominated. Given the Nobel Foundation’s frustrating policy of secrecy, there aren’t many numbers available for us to work with, but Langin’s report adds …

Being apolitical doesn’t mean politics doesn’t exist

A few years ago, we had a writer who would constantly pitch articles to us about how the Indian government should be doing X, Y or Z in the fight against this or that disease. Their submissions grew quickly tiresome, and then wholly ridiculous when, in one article (well before the pandemic), they wrote that …