Study: Despite CDC Report, It Is Unlikely That 4 Percent of Americans Drank Bleach to Ward Off Coronavirus
"Needless to say," said the Harvard Business Review, "these responses call into question the validity of the final participant’s data." Most likely, the person was a liar deliberately entering bad answers.
While the researchers noted that "the takeaway here isn’t that all survey data is garbage," they argued that "social scientists must also ensure the quality of their data in order to avoid reaching misleading conclusions." They concluded that the CDC's failure to ensure the quality of the data "led researchers, media, and the public to believe that up to 12 million Americans were drinking bleach. This claim was likely not only false, but also potentially harmful, as it may have served to normalize these dangerous behaviors and thus increase the number of people who might actually engage in them."