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The article reports that sex and gender are missing in COVID-19 data in the U.S., pointing out that most clinical trials do not report results by sex, as of July 2021. Topics include the paper published in "Nature Communications" which noted that only eight out of 45 COVID-19 randomized controlled trials reported the impact of sex or gender, the lack of attention to sex effects as indicated in several studies and the why suggesting a sex difference where one might not exist can be harmful.

The article reports that Norwegian oncologist Jon Sudbø, admitted this week through his attorney to falsifying data in three seminal papers published by top medical journals. The revelations have put on hold a multimillion-dollar oral cancer prevention trial, sponsored in part by the U.S. National Cancer Institute. The fraud is all the more unsettling given the recent fabrications by South Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang in stem cell science. The papers reported that 26 of 27 individuals with aneuploid mouth lesions having abnormal numbers of chromosomes, developed aggressive oral cancer and were more likely to die of the disease than were those with other types of lesions. An immediate casualty of the fraud may be a 360-person trial of the anti-inflammatory Celebrex, along with another drug, in healthy people with aneuploid mouth lesions. Two reports were published in the March 20, 2005 issue of the "Journal of Clinical Oncology" and the October 15, 2005 issue of the journal "The Lancet."