Opinion: Editor’s note: This opinion piece is now outdated

Editor’s note: STAT regrets publishing this First Opinion because we learned after publication that its central premise is wrong, through no fault of the with the National Health Service described it as a partnership that would include 140,000 healthy people. It did not call it a study or specify that patients would be randomized and that there would be a control group. The said these 140,000 participants will have annual blood tests for three years. On January 28, 2021, after this article had been submitted to STAT, the president of Grail Europe  that responded to  on the Grail-NHS partnership. The letter disclosed that Grail and the NHS planned to conduct a “pragmatic, controlled study” of the Grail test with randomization. Unfortunately, neither the authors of this piece nor STAT editors saw the letter before publishing the piece on Feb. 12. Grail spokesman Matt Burns told STAT on Feb. 13 that participants would be randomized 1:1 to the study’s two arms, with 70,000 getting the Grail test and 70,000 not getting it.