COVID Index: New Research Tool Makes It Easy to Find ‘Censored Science’
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is hosting a new initiative, The Covid Index, a volunteer-run directory of scientific resources on COVID-19, ranging from peer-reviewed journal papers to whistleblower accounts.
The index’s creators describe it as “censored science and expertise” that is “categorized, excerpted, and searchable.”
Ursula Conway, president of CHD’s Arizona Chapter, is one of the volunteers involved in the initiative. She told The Defender The Covid Index “is a research tool, a quick reference guide” that “cuts through” online censorship.
Kim Bare, another volunteer with the project, said The Covid Index is akin to “an online card catalog … of information sources related primarily to COVID.”
Epidemiologist M. Nathaniel Mead is also involved with this project. He told The Defender, “Only contributions from accredited scientists and medical professionals are included, with care taken to exclude non-expert opinions.”
“Whistleblower claims may also be included, provided that the sources themselves have the necessary qualifications and are able to provide credible evidence to back up their claims,” Mead said.
He said the database also includes “reviews and analyses that help elucidate the various types of subterfuge used to mislead the general public and medical communities.”
Goal of making scientific ‘information more accessible’ to a ‘broader audience’
The idea for The Covid Index originated in 2021, when one of the volunteers involved in the project, who goes by the pseudonym “Juror No. 8” — a reference to the classic film “12 Angry Men” — developed a document — “COVID-19: The Science We Should Know.”
The document, hosted by the National Health Federation, is organized by topic and serves “as a reference resource for anyone curious about the science and data underlying such contrarian positions” related to COVID-19.
The document was the impetus behind developing an online research database of credentialed resources questioning mainstream positions on COVID-19. Conway said the goal was to “make the information more accessible and readily available to a much broader audience.”
This led to the formation of an independent team of volunteers and a search for a host organization for the website — with CHD ultimately being selected.
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer, told The Defender:
“CHD is very excited about helping to maintain and expand this resource through volunteers who will continue to help screen and summarize the literature relevant to the virus, the vaccine and other details of the pandemic.”
A ‘counter-response’ to ‘mass media censorship’
The censorship of scientific papers questioning widely held COVID-19-related narratives has ramped up recently, with the retraction or deletion of papers approved by the peer-review process.
Mead said The Covid Index is a response to the widespread censorship of scientific papers that questioned mainstream narratives related to COVID-19, the response to the pandemic and the COVID-19 shots.
“Unethical retractions of peer-reviewed journal articles were all too frequent after 2020 and represent a very insidious form of censorship,” Mead said. “Even papers of the highest technical scientific quality will be retracted if they challenge the position of the Bio-Pharma Complex.”
“The Covid Index exposes the fallacious nature of rhetoric such as the ‘science is settled’ or ‘there’s a strong scientific consensus on safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines,’” Mead added.
Conway said The Covid Index “bypasses the censorship throttles, to bring real science to the people.”
Mead said it serves as a necessary counter-response to the “mass media censorship of critiques of public health agencies for their failed pandemic strategies” and has the potential to act as a public record of such censorship. He said:
“Those papers may still be cited in The Covid Index, and we are in the process of writing up explanatory paragraphs to help Index users understand more about the context of each retraction, i.e., why the retractions were devoid of merit or lacked substantiation.
“This part of The Covid Index is still a work in progress, but it could be a very useful way to keep a record of this aspect of the Bio-Pharma Complex’s censorship, and a repository of papers that were rejected simply because they threatened the COVID cartel’s agenda.”
Bare said that if a paper included in the index is subsequently removed from the internet, it, too, can potentially remain in the index. “For articles that are academically or scientifically sound but have disappeared for various reasons, we go to the Wayback Machine and find a URL for the information source and add an entry for it.”
“We’ve witnessed an astonishing degree of fraud, corruption and abuse in the COVID era,” Juror No. 8 said. “Ultimately, we hope The Covid Index can help hold the perpetrators accountable.”
Making censored science more accessible
More than just bypassing online and offline censors though, volunteers involved with the project told The Defender that information in the database is organized and presented in an accessible manner for a non-scientific audience.
A significant component of this effort are the “key excerpts” that The Covid Index’s volunteers curate for each indexed resource.
“The key excerpts highlight the most important parts of the study, or they represent the passages from the information source that made the contributor decide the source is important enough to include in The Covid Index,” Bare said.
Volunteer Jenna Ellis said this curation is the result of a collective effort.
“We go through [potential resources] to see if this is worth going into the index,” Ellis told The Defender. “We make sure to have our searchable keywords picked … so that it’s easily findable by someone who’s coming to search for different articles.”
Bare said the public can contribute to these efforts.
If people “want to contribute on a regular basis, the website is set up so contributors can get registered and add potential index entries themselves via a form on the website,” Bare said. Those interested can click here for more information.
“To the extent that we can expand the number of discerning contributors, then the content of The Covid Index grows and therefore its value grows — and that will drive who’s using it, how useful it is to people,” Conway said.
See more here The Defender
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATI ONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.