In Science, do opinions outweigh facts?

Long lasting implication of COVID “science”

There are some day to day things that are lasting implications of bad COVID policy.  Like people wearing masks outside, masks on the ground instead of the garbage, signage still posted limiting the number of people in rooms or elevators.  And what’s with people still having 10 masks hanging from their rearview mirrors – why isn’t 1 enough?  And then there are the potential educational implications of the lockdown…

But I believe we are seeing an impact on the objectivity in science.  For years, when COVID19 policy was based on a biased view of the extant science and frankly ignored tons of published science and research done by reputable scientists, we had a culture where opinion outweighed fact.  Weak scientific evidence justifying universal masking?  Doesn’t matter.  Scientific studies showing inefficacy of the vaccine and potential adverse effects?  Doesn’t matter.  This substack and many others have made this point ad naseum before.  The disregard of published peer-reviewed science created a culture of “your facts don’t matter, because I think THIS”.  It is now affecting peer review, which is supposed to be the bastion of science. 

I’ve seen this in my own research.  I can’t get into excruciating detail without revealing my identity, but in the last few months, I’ve actually had two papers rejected for weak reasons.  For one paper, a reviewer didn’t like my use of a particular term that has been coined in that field, even though it was backed up with multiple peer-reviewed citations – essentially that reviewer said “I don’t like that term”.  It didn’t even relate to the primary analyses of that paper.  In a second paper, an international reviewer blasted the American system of diagnosing a certain condition… even though we had been publishing work for over 20 years?  An international person criticizing the American system when they aren’t in the US and treating this disorder?  In both cases, and this is important, the editor was swayed by biased reviews rather than taking an independent stance. 

We’ve now seen a big example of this as it relates to COVID19 research.  The recent retraction of the paper by Nathaniel Mead et al. illustrates this new paradigm of “opinions >> facts”.  Dr. Peter McCullough wrote an extensive rebuttal, and I’ll refer to that a bit later.  For now, let’s look at the journal’s retraction statement at face value, and discuss the broader implications of this sort of rebuttal policy. 

The rebuttal statement from the journal:

The Editors-in-Chief have retracted this article. Following publication, concerns were raised regarding a number of claims made in this article. Upon further review, the Editors-in-Chief found that the conclusions of this narrative review are considered to be unreliable due to the concerns with the validity of some of the cited references that support the conclusions and a misrepresentation of the cited references and available data. The authors disagree with this retraction.

As pointed out in Dr. McCullough’s substack on this matter, this paper was extensively peer-reviewed – 8 reviewers, according to that article.  So this is highly irregular in and of itself.  But let’s look at the specific points here:

·       “concerns with the validity of some of the cited references”

The Mead paper had 293 citations.  That is far more (2-4x more) than most peer-reviewed papers.  A broad sweeping statement about “validity of some of the cited references” is hard to defend, when some of these papers were actually published in high impact journals: JAMA, Nature, Clinical Infectious Disease, and Vaccine (though this one you could argue is middle-impact).  If you are calling into question “some” cited references without being specific, that clearly perpetuates publication bias.  Publication bias is a known problem in science and existed forever.  Opinion >> fact essentially normalizes publication bias. 

·       “misrepresentation of the cited references and available data”

This one is curious because most of the figures were actually taken directly from the cited papers (again, peer-reviewed and published papers). 

Back to a point I made earlier about my own (real life) work and something I’ve seen happen with my colleagues as well… Truly, what was the role of the editor in this?  The editor accepted the paper after “extensive” (Dr. McCullough’s word) peer review.  According to McCullough’s rebuttal, there were 8 peer reviewers, which is 3-4 times more than a paper usually gets.  McCullough suspects (and based on my reading, this seems likely) that this was triggered in response to comments made by a reader.  Back to what I’ve experienced – I don’t think those editors had the expertise, fortitude, guts, wherewithal, etc. to make a call themselves.  Honestly, journals are drowning in submissions these days so editors get overwhelmed.  So if you don’t have the expertise or standing, call in someone else.  An independent reviewer or editor.  I did it back in the day that I was an editor.

One thing I will point out – among those 293 citations were a lot of non-science.  Substacks, press articles – those are fine (maybe) for media articles but don’t pass muster for scientific journals.  Those of us fighting the freedom fight have to hold ourselves to a higher bar, because we have so much skepticism to overcome.  I have experience in this – when I wrote something early in the pandemic, I shortcutted myself and cited a website where literature was summarized… a website that I curated anonymously.  So I looked like I was doing bad science as an “anti-vaxxer” where I was really just citing my previous work.  We can’t get away with that.

Now back to the point of this now rather long substack.  Why am I saying that that this growing corruption in peer review is due to COVID?  The pandemic was a time when only one view of the science was ever presented, and it was accepted as truth, and no debate was allowed.  That in and of itself is totally unacademic – healthy debate used to be common in academia and science.  And once The Narrative took over and some brave scientists and doctors tried to challenge it, they were silenced, and often with negative implications on their careers.  The norm became to accept one view and dismiss the other.  There were scientists that I know that agreed with me, but didn’t want to endanger their careers.  When it became standard practice to accept only one view on a scientific issue, that began to seep into the way some scientists started to see the world.  Another point in support of this is the really crappy quality of research that was done in support of The Narrative – that will be the topic of an upcoming substack on this page!  That’s my theory.  There were no debates during COVID, and now there are no debates on other scientific topics. 

Epilogue: I started drafting this post a week ago (busy, fatigued from a chronic condition, etc).  In the past week, there was a congressional hearing on censorship in academic journals… which apparently was a complete waste, but here’s the link anyway.  Even if you could fix the corruption in the higher levels of journals, you still can’t fix the personal biases of the individual peer reviewers. 

PS - if you want to empower yourself to read the literature and identify these biases, I strongly recommend IPAK-EDU!