Exercise 3: Does Peer Review Alone Catch Fraud? — Possible Solution
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The friend's argument assumes peer review functions as a real-time
fraud detector - that a reviewer, reading a submitted paper before
publication, would catch deliberately altered data or an undisclosed
financial conflict. In practice, peer review mostly checks whether a
study's stated methods and conclusions are internally consistent and
follow accepted scientific reasoning - it is not designed to, and
generally cannot, independently re-verify a researcher's own raw data,
patient records, or personal financial relationships.

The real twelve-year gap between Wakefield's 1998 publication and the
2010 retraction directly undermines the "peer review would have caught
it" argument in three ways:

1. The paper DID pass peer review and was published in one of the
   world's most prestigious medical journals - so peer review, as it
   actually operates, did not catch the fraud at the point the friend's
   argument claims it would have.

2. What actually uncovered the fraud was journalist Brian Deer's own
   independent investigative reporting - years of external work
   completely outside the peer review process, not a review of the
   original submission.

3. Twelve years is a long enough real-world gap that genuine harm (falling
   vaccination rates, real measles outbreaks) had already occurred before
   the correction caught up - meaning even if peer review does
   eventually contribute to catching bad research, the real-world
   timing means individual readers still need their own critical habits
   as a first line of defense, not a replacement one.

ANSWER: The twelve-year gap shows that peer review, as it actually
functions, is not built to catch deliberately concealed fraud like a
financial conflict of interest or altered data - the paper was already
published and treated as credible for over a decade before an
outside journalist's own investigation, not the peer review process
itself, exposed it. That real timing gap is exactly why individual
readers still need their own critical-evaluation habits, rather than
outsourcing that entirely to the journal review process.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This directly engages the friend's specific claim, uses the real
twelve-year timeline from the chapter as concrete evidence against it,
and correctly identifies what actually did catch the fraud instead of
peer review.