Scientists have a powerful role in determining South African government health policy: Unpacking how and why different scientists may suggest very different policies

Appropriate public health policy, and the associated budgetary decisions, are extremely important to society, and rely on expert scientific input. Scientists who provide this input, typically medical researchers alongside statisticians specialising in medical data, are required to produce objective, transparent analysis that will aid the politicians who make these crucial policy decisions. In this article we give examples of how scientists who publish work in the area of public health can overlook critical aspects of data analysis and arrive at inappropriate conclusions not supported by the data. We believe that all data used in such studies should be freely available, and suggest principles that scientists and journals should adhere to in order to ensure that the statistical models used on the data and the conclusions reached on the basis of the statistical analysis have been subjected to intensive interrogation by as large a pool of scientists as possible.