This week’s furore is microplastics researchers’ ozone moment. If they fail, the powerful plastics lobby will step into the breach

• Debora MacKenzie is a science journalist and author of Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

Are we being injured and killed by ubiquitous, teeny-tiny shards of toxic plastic? Or aren’t we? For many months, the Guardian has reported a series of worrying scientific results that our bodies are full of jagged microplastic particles that could be giving us everything from heart attacks to reproductive problems.

But on Tuesday, the Guardian revealed that a significant number of scientists think many of these studies showed no such thing. Or maybe they did. The methods are new and riddled with problems, so we can’t always reliably tell.

Debora MacKenzie is a science journalist and author of Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity