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Peer Review of Medical/Scientific Papers has become a Farce Driven by Political and Financial Concerns
Related: ethics in medicine, gear, gears of the machine, peer review, Sebastian Rushworth MD
re:COVID
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
Does peer review of medical/scientific papers mean much any more?
Surely it has some value in stopping obviously bad papers from being published. But most scientific and medical studies are bullshit anyway! And the number of retractions is absurdly high. We live in a world awash with garbage “science”.
Now let’s add in politics, money, and status. What exactly does “peer” review mean? Which peers?Those that agree with the narrative, of course! What are the chances of contrarian opposing viewpoints having any role in reviewing a paper for publication? Nil.
For example, do you think that John Ioannidis would have let the garbage science in the Bangladesh mask study be published on his watch? Almost certainly not, but who is ever going to ask a world-class thinker like him to review such a laughable study?
More problematic for decades now: are the chances of a high-grade study showing a prescription drug does more harm than good? Big Pharma’s minions would never let that happen. Companies like Pfizer have paid big penalties for falsifying data and lying about their products—look it up. The pressures from these entities including the direct personal attacks on study authors, getting them fired, etc.
Taking this to the other side, what are the chances of an unpopular viewpoint getting past GroupThink peer review committees? About zero. How many studies opposing the orthodoxy get published... I’d guess few to none. And then, if you want to stay in the field, you had better toe the line and not come up with anything that challenges the orthodoxy.
Peer review sounds good, but in today’s world, but it’s an idea built on premises that today have no foundation.
Here’s an MD’s viewpoint.
Sebastian Rushworth MD: A reflection on covid mania
by Sebastian Rushworth M.D.., 23 September 2021. Emphasis added.
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It’s hard to maintain faith in science when it is so wilfully distorted to accord with a political agenda, and when many doctors and scientists so happily go along with what is handed down from on high. I recently learned that an excellent study on the covid vaccines, carried out at a prestigious institution, has spent months trying to get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but has been denied again and again, because its results don’t align with the official dogma. Clearly, the journals are engaging in politically motivated censorship.
When this is the case, peer-review becomes a harmful process, whose only purpose is to determine the political acceptability of research, not it’s quality or usefulness. It becomes impossible for the lay person, and even for doctors and scientists, to know what the truth is, because uncomfortable truths remain buried or remain at the pre-print stage, which makes it all too easy to dismiss them – “Oh, that’s just a pre-print, it hasn’t been peer-reviewed”. That is the world we live in.
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WIND: “follow the science” ===> “follow the officially approved science”!
