Peer review is the end-all-be-all of legitimate research because it’s how the scientific community distinguishes between work that does and doesn’t meet its professional standards. Since the scientific community is the best judge of whether a given piece of research is legitimate, Oreskes and Conway suggest that policymakers, the media, and the public should decide which science to believe in primarily by placing their trust in the peer review process. In the case of secondhand smoke, peer reviewers rejected both of Fred Singer’s objections as unfounded. For instance, many studies came out at a lower confidence interval than scientists usually demand, but these studies simply didn’t
need a higher confidence interval because of their sheer quantity and consistency—coupled with the robust existing research about tobacco’s direct harms to smokers.