Poo to Peer Review By Professor X
Here I am, a professor in a totally woke university and over-the-top hyper-woke department, sending off this article to Alor.org, and loving it! Now, one of the leading bits of bs of academia is peer review, which always reminded me of dogs sniffing each other, if I may be somewhat rude, and unacademic for a moment. Peer review received its grand refutation during the Covid plandemic, when first, almost all mainstream medical academics got behind the bat soup hypothesis, because China would come under scrutiny otherwise. In private they doubted this, but still pushed the line to protect “China’s science,” as one medical academic put it. And, it is today, only a handful of brave renegade doctors who are dealing with the greatest medical crime in history, at the price of personal de-registration. In short, peer review presupposes that the “peers” are not corrupt, and will objectively assess data, but given that most researchers hold to the line that “he who pays the piper, calls the tune,” don’t expect any mainstream searching critiques of Big Pharma. Peer review fails for the very good reason that the peers are as corrupt as the original researcher. It is one of the reasons that there is a “replication crisis.”
“The Epoch Times spoke with a professor who spent more than 25 years in a top 10 medical school. This scientist did not want to be named for fear of reprisals.
“I call it sneer review,” the scientist said. “There is tremendous bias. Reviewers ignore data that doesn’t fit with what they already believe.”
The scientist said that certain fields have fewer problems with special interests than others, and certain topics—including the safety of modern medicine and, especially, the safety of vaccines—tend to push ideological buttons.
“The idea in science should be that we just push towards finding out the answer. We have a hypothesis, we ask questions, we test the hypotheses, we collect more data,” this scientist said. “That’s how we move forward. But when it gets polarized, the sneer-review phenomenon starts to happen. Then it becomes a more ideological confrontation.”
“People will try to publish total nonsense for ideological reasons,” the scientist added.
When Ideology Drives Decisions
When peer-reviewed studies have the potential to harm multi-billion-dollar industries, they often get retracted, several scientists told The Epoch Times.
“Follow the silenced science,” said Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, CEO and Director of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK). Lyons-Weiler has published more than 50 peer-reviewed studies on a variety of topics. He recently had a controversial study retracted.
It is especially difficult to publish research that calls vaccine safety into question in the first place, Lyons-Weiler said, and these studies are often summarily retracted by controversy-adverse editors.
“They tend to be retracted after critique by anonymous critics,” Lyons-Weiler said. “This is a problematic new development. The journals are retracting based on criticism from anonymous reviewers, instead of publishing the critique and allowing the authors to rebut. That means the critics’ comments are not peer-reviewed.”
The retraction may happen a week after the science is published, or more than 10 years.
Canceling Critics, a Technique to Silence Science
A Danish medical doctor who worked for the pharmaceutical industry for almost a decade, Peter Gøtzsche saw firsthand how his bosses would manipulate data that did not fit their industry agenda. Largely as a result of that frustration, Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, a non-profit initiative with an explicit goal to keep bias out of science.
For years the Cochrane Collaboration was considered the gold standard of unbiased information and Gøtzsche, who himself published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and eight books, hailed as a crusader for scientific integrity.
In September of 2018, however, Gøtzsche was voted off Cochrane’s board (six in favor, five opposed, one abstention). This move led four board members to resign in protest. He was also fired from his position as director of the Nordic Cochrane Center and suspended from the hospital where he worked.
Gøtzsche told journalist and documentary filmmaker Bert Ehgartner that he believed his dismissal was because he and two co-authors criticized a Cochrane review that found “high-certainty evidence” that a vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV) protected women and girls from cervical precancer. Gøtzsche critiqued the review, pointing out that Cochrane had excluded almost half the trials and ignored glaring safety signals about the vaccine.
A hero of scientific integrity to many, Gøtzsche is now being ostracized by his colleagues and characterized as “an industry scold.”
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” German physicist Max Planck has famously wrote in his 1950 autobiography, “but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
According to Lyons-Weiler, science continues to move forward even without funerals. IPAK is currently engaged in a second phase of a study to examine the health outcomes of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. This time, it has the participation of medical doctor, Russell Blaylock, a neurosurgeon who has warned against the toxicity of aluminum in vaccines for over two decades.
In the meantime, do the problems with peer-review mean we should reject new scientific findings? Watch out for the warning signs. Ask the question: Who is David and who is Goliath?
The discerning reader, whether scientist, academic, ethicist, journalist, or lay person, will understand that any asserted scientific “fact” or “conclusion” must be combined with common sense, a healthy skepticism, and a closer look at those who stand to profit.
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