About as weak a study as you can find: Link between wildfires and COVID cases established. This poor quality paper is receiving mountains of press coverage purporting to link the number of Covid cases to wildfire smoke. Harvard’s own press release calls the link “established” when this correlation-only is an hypothesis.

This looks like they decided on a conclusion, rounded up lots of data, threw it into the Stat-O-Meter and out popped a “correlation”. The authors said its correlation without causation, making it an hypothesis.

There are so many things wrong with this paper that I won’t try to explain it.

If you do not understand the problem with this kind of nonsense science then consider how I showed last year that Covid wave peaks correlate with solar sunspot numbers.

This pandemic has seen a flood of shitty papers that have cherry picked data or drawn random correlations to “prove” their desired point.

Perhaps we could write a paper documenting a correlation between pandemics and shitty research papers?

Coldstreams