Exposing How ‘Peer Review’ skews the Science
And settling things in favour of establishment narratives and ideaology.
Peer review is the vehicle, and as shown in an earlier article in May 2024, the brainchild of the tycoon Robert Maxwell.
His Pergamon Press, funded perhaps by the intelligence services, initially published peer review journals in science, technology and medicine, with all the reviewers being ‘insiders’ (ie mainstream academics) rather than independent researchers.
Currently, the quantity of a university’s peer-reviewed outputs determines the allocation of British government research funding, with high-ranking journals (those with a narrow focus) calling the shots.
Unfortunately, not only is research rarely replicated and AI-created text increasingly common, leading to journal closures, but challenging and innovative research is normally rejected.
We are then left with what Professor Alvesson of Lund and Queensland universities has described has described as a ‘proliferation of meaningless research of no value to society’, ‘nonsense’ and a ‘vacuum of meaning’.
Strong stuff and even the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) exposed in 2014 and 2021 how and why innovative research gets rejected. The first article revealed that 85 percent of the most cited papers had originally been rejected by three elite medical journals before being published elsewhere.
The authors from the Universities of Toronto, California and Sydney did not mince their words, concluding that:
‘This raises serious concerns about peer review’….since it is ‘ill-suited to recognise and gestate the most impactful ideas and research’.
The second article by authors from NorthWestern and Chicago universities highlighted how innovative findings are overlooked by virtue of the voluminous number of new papers coming through.
With journal articles multiplying like rabbits, the problem can only get worse.
History confirms the way that innovative research is sidelined by peer review with examples from no fewer than four Nobel Laureates.
- One is Professor Dan Shechtman whose ground-breaking work on quasicrystals – research that broke the laws of crystallography – was rejected by the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.
- Then there is the case of Professor Peter Higgs whose seminal paper on the Higgs model (explaining the origins of mass of subatomic particles) was rejected in 1966.
- From Italy, there is the case of Professor Giorgio Parisi whose research paper on complex physical systems was rejected by a journal with the words ‘This article is not worth the cost of the paper on which it is printed’.
- The ultimate cause célèbre concerns the Nobel Laureate, Dr Kary Mullis, whose early paper on the discovery of the PCR method was rejected by the journal Science, one with a worldwide readership of more than a million people.
We can well ask where that leaves governments which harangue their citizens to ‘follow the science’ whilst also mandating PCR testing.
Is it time to remove peer review from its exalted position as the lodestone of research excellence?
Three recent events, all centred on the Lancet, the medical journal with the second highest impact scores, must now challenge public confidence in the peer review system. The first, from May 2020 concerns an article that passed through peer review with its claim thatthe drug, hydroxychloroquine, triggers increased deaths and heart-related complications.
Then, after serious questions wereposed concerning the alleged dataset of c.15,000 Covid patients (used alongside a control group of 81,000), the article was retracted only two weeks after publication.
Despite this, the article’sconclusions gave the WHO a pretext to halt trials concerning the use of HCQ as an antidote to Covid 19, paving the way for acceptance of the Covid ‘vaccine’ as the favoured treatment option.
A cynic might ask whether the dodgy nature of the data would have gone unnoticed in the peer reviewprocess.
The second instance, this time in July 2023, concerns an article uploaded to the Lancet website and awaiting review. This article concluded from a review of 325 autopsies that the Covid jab had triggered 74 percent of the deaths and despite the fact that it was yet to be reviewed, it was removed from the Lancet website within 24 hours of appearing there.
A note appeared stating that ‘the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology’ and this is strange since according to one of the article’s nine authors, cardiologist Dr Peter McCollough, the project was approved through the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health and used a standard scientific evaluation methodology.
Many in the team were highly respected in their field including Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch, senior pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson and Dr Peter McCollough himself.
The authors re-submitted the paper elsewhere and it was finally published, through peer review, in June 2024 in Forensic Science International, almost one year following its removal from the Lancet website.
This delay of a year is concerning since jabs continued to be administered for this period and the delay may have cost lives.
In fact, what happened with the Lancet here mirrors the earlier fate of another paper co-authored by Dr McCullough, this one reporting on jab-related problems of myocarditis. This was withdrawn from the journal Current Problems in Cardiology in 2021.
Of concern, thirdly, are the remarks made by the Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief, Dr Richard Horton, in 2020. He said then that ‘we now need to reinvent the idea of the scientific journal’ … so that it is ‘more activist in its engagement with the challenges of society’.
He included in this the need for the journal to follow the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
This makes science subordinate to globalist policies, thereby undermining objective reason and truth and paving the way for Huval Harari’s vision of a ‘post-truth society’.
Dangerous territory that Max Horkheimer alerted us to in in his book Eclipse of Reason where he described ‘instrumental reason’ (the very thing Dr Horton advocates for the Lancet) as producing authoritarianism.
The antidote, according to Horkheimer, is a critical form of objective reason, something that can be delivered by systems that prioritises critical thinking.
So, the development of critical thinking must be our priority in developing new and better systems of education.
Bold emphasis added
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Saeed Qureshi
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@ “reinvent the idea of the scientific journal’…”
Please do not do it. The public is suffering disastrously from the invention of the idea of “medical science,” which is a fake and false science to begin with. “Medical science” means or implies the science of doctors.
May I ask?
Why do doctors present themselves as science experts (“scientists”)? There is no evidence available to support this claim. Academically, their training and experience do not support their claim. For example, an M.D. degree is a basic undergraduate non-science degree.
Please describe which science (subject, such as physics, chemistry, and/or mathematics) they studied or practiced and where they learned the science (i.e., who taught them experimental science and conducting its research), particularly chemistry. They forcefully claim to practice science and research in medicines, which are chemical compounds/molecules that react with body chemistry (chemical reactions).
For example, they claim to isolate viruses and their components, such as RNA, spike proteins, etc. However, there is no evidence of their existence and availability. They claim to develop tests such as PCR, antigen, etc., without proof of how these tests were developed and validated, lacking their reference standards (a cardinal sin from a scientific perspective). Moreover, how is it possible to develop a treatment (vaccine) without testing against the virus or its illness?
One can argue that it is not the issue of peer reviews. It is medical experts’ promotion and claims of false and fraudulent science – the issue that must be addressed.
Science fakers (https://bioanalyticx.com/doctors-role-in-illness-and-treatment-development-and-invention-needs-to-stop/)
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