Has COPE membership become a way for unprincipled journals to buy a fake badge of integrity?

In the previous blog https://drpeterwilmshurst.wordpress.com/2022/09/25/is-the-lancet-complicit-in-research-fraud/ Professor Patricia Murray and I explained that the Lancet has failed to retract two articles by Paolo Macchiarini, which described surgery on a patient in Barcelona in 2008 and her follow up in 2014.^1,2 There is no doubt that senior editors of the Lancet know that the publications are fraudulent. They have the evidence of fraud relating to these publications, which caused serious patient harms. The Lancet’s continued endorsement of Macchiarini’s publications is difficult to understand because a branch of Sweden’s Central Ethical Review Board found him guilty of research fraud in 2017 and requested retraction of publications that Macchiarini falsified when working at the Karolinska Institute. The Swedish investigators had no authority to consider Macchiarini’s original 2008 paper from when he worked in Barcelona. Since 2019, Macchiarini has received criminal convictions in Italy and Sweden for harming patients in those countries after he…