The Mocking of the Scientific Journal: Part One
The Invention of a Journal and Retrospective Peer Review, a Bizarre Tale of Anti-Vax Credibility Cleansing
Yesterday, Martin Kulldoorf, whose embrace of flawed COVID research and advocacy for the infect-the-non-elderly strategy of the Great Barrington Declaration led Harvard to show him the exit, declared a “new academic publishing model” with the launch of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health. The journal is staffed by the usual suspects of COVID minimization along with a few from the contact lists of the Stanford professors and packed with papers that could not find a home in the old academic publishing model. Before untangling the web of deception that surrounds this creation, consider an earlier example of this new publishing model.
On July 4, 2023, the internet buzzed over a paper purporting to show “a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death”. The Tweet from senior author, Peter McCullough, featured a link to the Lancet, among the world’s most prestigious medical journals, which had put the paper on its preprint server. In the 24 hours it took the journal’s editors to pull the paper, it had gone viral. Their rejection, stating that “the methodology did not support the conclusions”, didn’t stop 150 thousand people from downloading the preprint after it was moved to another server. But that was just the beginning of an astonishingly crass, cynical, and self-serving journey to “peer reviewed’ publication that demonstrates the profound flaws in our system of scientific publishing.
The Lancet version of the article also included the following caveat:
“Declaration of Interest: Drs Alexander, Amerling, Hodkinson, Makis, McCullough, Risch, Trozzi are affiliated with and receive salary support and or hold equity positions in The Wellness Company”
The Wellness Company is McCullough’s COVID centered money machine, hawking Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine in a “Contagion Emergency Kit” and an herbal “Spike Support” to the anti-vaccine, anti-scientific consensus crowd.
McCullough immediately pivoted, making the rounds of the podcasts with the message that he had shown the vaccine to be deadly and the medical establishment to be a pawn of the pharmaceutical industry. The rejection, he insisted, was “censorship”.
Meanwhile, he sent the manuscript on to other journals. A year later, it appeared in Forensic Science International. It’s not clear how many journals rejected it along the way, but, given the 44-fold drop in impact factor between the Lancet and FSI, it seems likely there were more than one. But at least it was peer reviewed.
Until it wasn’t.
The note that accompanied the retraction from FSI was damning:
• Inappropriate citation of references.
• Inappropriate design of methodology.
• Errors, misrepresentation, and lack of factual support for the conclusions.
• Failure to recognize and cite disconfirming evidence.
But McCullough was undaunted. If you can’t get a peer reviewed journal to publish your paper, invent one.
The other part of this story begins in 2015, when anti-vax advocate, James Lyons-Weiler, started the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge. Areas of research for the Institute, according to its founding press release, would “include Accuracy in Treatments (e.g., inappropriate use of medicines in nursing homes), ADHD Overdiagnosis, Early Alzheimer’s Diagnosis and Treatment, Early Detection and Diagnosis of Emerging Diseases, Vaccine Safety Research, and factors contributing to Veteran’s Suicide”. This is a broad portfolio for what appears to have started as a one man show, but Lyons-Weiler is a data scientist who purports to have expertise in “Science, Logic, and Mathematics, Metaphysics and Epistemology, History of Western Philosophy, and Philosophy”. Then, in August of 2019, he launched a blog, “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law”, with a url that suggested bigger plans,
https://www.publichealthpolicyjournal.com/
, five initial posts, and an editorial board packed with anti-vaccine advocates. Over the next four years they added just nine posts, most of them related to COVID vaccines. For a 20-month period, it seemed moribund, putting out just two posts, until it emerged transformed in July of 2024. Peter McCullough had found his journal and broadcast it across social media. The “censorship” problem was solved.
The McCullough Foundation had bankrolled and polished the blog, put peer-review lipstick on it, and rolled it out as if it had been there for five years, stocked with retroactively peer reviewed papers. Many of those papers had been pulled out of the closet and sanitized.
Three of the articles were mere blog posts four years earlier when the site launched. Another 12 have publication dates from well before the site even began peer review (some which appear to have been weirdly post-dated). Suddenly, all of them magically became peer reviewed articles. Twelve of the fifteen articles are related to negative effects of vaccination.
I’ll have much more to say about the larger issues of peer review in a later post but suffice it to say that the reason that the Lancet summarily rejected the paper and FSI retracted it probably had a lot more to do with the quality of the paper than the open-mindedness of the peer reviewers. This build-your-own-journal model for doing an end run around peer review must have resonated with Great Barrington crowd, because they have used their influence to create a more convincing and, hence, more worrisome incarnation of the scientific journal. Their “new academic publishing model” if it is extensively replicated may raises questions about the ultimate viability of the journal as a reliable source of vetted research.
More about that in Part 2.
Good Lord. Much as I love pre-prints, they can exacerbate this kind of thing. Peer review is maybe the worst of all systems for scientific debate, apart from all the others?
I don´t deny the irrationality of current statements passed as Medical and/or Scientific in the Discourse about Diseases by non experts, or qualified experts who talk nonsense.
But from my point of view, my experience and knowledge it seems to me the almost conclusion, to make a medical pun: the outcome, perhaps not the result? despite best efforts! of the History of Medicine and Medical non-research in the Past decades. (After all some patients get better even well despite treatment!, it happens!, who is to tell the difference?, hence the medical use of outcome and not result!, is lingo for as it happened more or less)
A lot fo drugs are withdrawn after reaching market for harmful side effects. Saying those are not detected in effectiveness trials on account of sample sizes does not take into account the over 90% withdrawal rates at least in one published study.
Nor it accounts for the lack of clear mechanism of action, the pharmacokinetics, nor the pharmacodynamical omissions in some subsamples. Nor the bias in selection of research subjects. Among other Pharma Trickery.
Nor it accounts for the invention of Diseases or the expansion of definitions of Diseases to larger and larger segments of population previously diagnosed as normal.
Nor the lack of published research in how to apply research results to unique patients. This last one was common when I was a med student decades ago. Specially when Drugs mechanisms were known for most drugs used then mixed with the physiopathology of unique patients.
Therapy by obscurity I think lead to this Fiasco, almost maddness, currently engulfing in irrational rhetoric to put it mildly. In great part, but I admit Therapy was not the only driving force.
And such is not the responsibility of the current buffoons like Bienveniste, the Canards, but the Clinical Researchers, Journals, Collegiate Bodies, Key Opinion Leaders, Law and it´s effects on Regulators like the FDA, etc. Among the ideological incentives and the probably not cost/effectiveness of most medical treatments for at least Chronic Diseases. Among others.
My point is there is History there, this Carnival of Buffoons did not started after the 2000s nor the 2010s...