There are some very obvious problems that never seem to go away. Right now, I can see 1,592 articles on Google News about one poor girl who died unexpectedly after receiving the cervical cancer vaccine, and only 363 explaining the postmortem found a massive and previously undiagnosed tumour in her chest.

But this month, while the media wound themselves into an emotive frenzy of elaborate conspiracy theories, killer vaccines and industry cover-ups, the real death action was to be found hidden away in bland, dry data, when the Journal of the American Medical Association published one of the most damning papers of the year.

We have known for decades that academic publishing faces two serious problems. One is that trials often go missing in action: a drug company might do eight trials of a drug, say, but only two have a positive result. So those two will appear in an academic journal, while the other six with negative results quietly disappear. Bizarrely, regulatory bodies like the FDA get to see this negative data, but often enough doctors do not.

This is a familiar problem, and a murderous one, because the results of all 8 trials combined might show that the treatment is ineffective; in the absence of this full information, people are subjected unnecessarily to side effects, and deprived of other more effective treatments.

On top of that, we also know that researchers can change their stated goal, or “primary outcome”, after their trial has finished. You might do a trial on a blood pressure pill, for example, stating that you will look to see if it can reduce heart attacks, but find that it doesn’t. Then you might retrospectively change the purpose of your study, ignore the heart attacks, pretend it was only ever about blood pressure, and glowingly report a reduction in blood pressure as if this was what you were always interested in. Or you might measure so many different things that some of them will show up as positive simply by chance.

Both of these problems are supposed to have been fixed by clinical trials registers: before you start your trial you publish the protocol, saying what your primary outcome is, how many people are in your trial, when it will finish, and so on. Then, by looking at the protocol and the finished academic paper (if it appears) people can see if your trial has gone missing in action, or if you have misled them by changing your primary outcome.