Both NEJM and The Lancet allowed themselves to be suckered here.
.Science 05 Jun 2020: Vol. 368, Issue 6495, pp. 1041-1042
Reminds me of when 60 Minutes fell for a hoax in 2004, which cost Dan Rather his career, the Killian documents controversy:
.When I saw the documents in the newspapers, I knew that they could not have come from the National Guard in the 1970s. How? I worked for the FCC in that same era, and we did not have typewriters anywhere that good. The typewriters we had were all mechanical Underwood units purchased during WW1, and were quite worn, and the typed text looked it. The letters etc were malformed so badly that no OCR unit of the day could read them. Humans didn't have a problem, though. To make anything like what the documents looked like required an IBM Selectric, which nobody other than Headquarters had, as Selectric typewriters were quite expensive.
Joe Gwinn