That oft-spouted dictum ‘follow the science’ would not have surprised American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn explained how ‘normal science’ becomes a rigid orthodoxy, maintained by rewards in pay, promotion and prestige. Great force is needed to disrupt the established paradigm and its assumptions, as everted by the discoveries of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Consequently, science progresses not as linear trajectory but by a series of revolutions.
The peer review process in scientific journals is meant for quality control, but it has been criticised by editors of prestigious journals such as Richard Smith of the British Medical Journal, Marcia Angell of the New England Journal of Medicine and Richard Horton of the Lancet, the latter remarking:
We know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.
A bigger problem than inconsistency is reinforcement of prevailing ideological consensus, as shown by the difficulty of climate change sceptics in getting their work in print. By contrast, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose got a series of absurd spoof papers published in the journals of various ‘grievance studies’ such as Gender, Place & Culture. One paper explained the penis as a social construct, in the second the authors claimed to have examined thousands of canine genitals to reveal rape culture in dog parks, the third argued that men could quell their transphobia by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys, and the fourth was a translation of Mein Kampf with feminist buzz words. Research is judged on acceptability rather than scientific validity, it seems.
This departure from due diligence is a mystery to many, but it is explained well by Costică Brădățan in UnHerd of December 21st:
How did papers of no scholarly merit pass, sometimes with flying colours, the crucial test whereby a scholar’s subjective opinion becomes reliable knowledge: the peer-review process? Because the authors understood how important conformism to the dominant ideological orthodoxy is in the academic humanities. The hoaxers didn’t need to place any real knowledge in their submissions, only the recognisable markers of belonging to the same camp — dazzling buzzwords such as ‘rape culture’, ‘queer performativity’, ‘systemic oppression’ — which mesmerised both journal editors and the external reviewers.
In 1975, Professor David Horrobin founded the journal Medical Hypotheses as an outlet for ‘revolutionary science’. Instead of peer review, Horrobin made all publishing decisions as Chief Editor. The journal was owned by Pergamon, a company established in 1951 by Robert Maxwell. Pergamon expanded to hundreds of journals and Maxwell, the media tycoon, made a fortune in selling it to Elsevier in 1991. Pergamon did not interfere with Medical Hypotheses, but the new owner did.
After Horrobin died he was replaced by Bruce Charlton. In 2009 Charlton accepted a paper by Peter Duesberg, a virologist at Berkeley who contested the link between HIV and AIDS. Duesberg supported the South African government’s decision to withhold antiretroviral drugs from AIDS sufferers. This was sacrilege to the AIDS research community, which was thriving on huge research grants. Scientists associated with the U.S. National Institutes of Health threatened to banish Elsevier journals from the National Library of Medicine unless the article was retracted. Elsevier relented to pressure and Charlton was dismissed as Editor. As the Secret Professor wrote in The Dark Side of Academia (2022): “Peer review had to be instituted in order to ensure that existing truths were not threatened again.”
Censorial activity escalated with COVID-19. For example, both of us were denied the right of reply in the prestigious Journal of Advanced Nursing published by Wiley after being smeared in its editorial pages over our expressed views on lockdown. One journal editor –Jose L. Domingo of Food and Chemical Toxicology – who published a controversial COVID-19 article and also requested manuscripts “on the potential toxic effects of COVID-19 vaccines” resigned after concern about “deep discrepancies” with the journal’s direction under publisher Elsevier as the reason for his early exit. One of us (RW) has raised the possibility that the Committee on Publication Ethics may be complicit in the process of censoring academics and editors and has expressed concern over what the major academic publishers classify as ‘misinformation’ regarding COVID-19.
Academic journals are commercial enterprises and are under no obligation to publish anything sent to them. They favour manuscripts that are likely to be cited highly to maximise impact factor – a key measure of journal performance in a competitive marketplace. A manuscript may be rejected in initial desk screening by the Editor-in-Chief, subsequent screening by an editor to whom it was assigned or following peer review. In some cases, an Editor-in-Chief may overrule the Editor and reject a manuscript. Peer reviewers are chosen for their specialist expertise, but they merely make recommendations to editors. They may warn about a manuscript with contrary findings or controversial claims, and some editors will shy away from potential trouble.
The extent of retraction of counter-narrative COVID-19 articles, as tracked by website Retraction Watch is very concerning, If a manuscript published as an article is subsequently retracted the convention is that it remains on the website and available at the original digital object identifier, but with a prominent header indicating that it has been retracted or a ‘Retracted’ watermark across the pages. However, this process has not been followed with the vast majority of retracted COVID-19 articles. Reputable publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley and PLOS One have been mounting retraction notices and completely removing the original articles.
Scientific preprint outlets, which enable researchers to publicise their findings before peer review, boast of their openness to any study results. However, just as the sanctuary of freedom of speech at Speakers Corner fell to the COVID-19 regime, so did the preprint websites. Several papers on COVID-19 by Professors Norman Fenton and Martin Neil, despite adhering to scientific standards of analysis and reporting, were routinely rejected. For example, Fenton and Neil recently submitted an analysis of ONS vaccine surveillance data to medRxiv, which responded:
We regret to inform you that your manuscript is inappropriate for posting. medRxiv is intended for research papers, and our screening process determined that this manuscript fell short of that description.
A similar response by arXiv dismissed the article as out of scope, yet as Fenton and Neil observed, “this is curious given the enormous number of papers they have on Covid data analytics”.
What is to be done? Gatekeepers are manipulating the dissemination of scientific research, but this is not an easy problem to solve. One of us (RW) has been an editor on three journals during the COVID-19 period. The only policy of which he is aware is a widespread agreement across the academic publishing industry to fast-track COVID-19 manuscripts as a public health priority. He is not aware of any policies to publish only articles that align with the official narrative (lockdowns good, masks effective and vaccines safe). However, pressure is clearly being exerted at some point and it has extended beyond the publishing industry to the preprint environment.
When research is blocked from preprint exposure, effectively it doesn’t exist. Surely if preprint sites are used properly then we have nothing to fear from publication of manuscripts that challenge medical or scientific orthodoxy. If an argument is flawed or analysis faulty, let these flaws and faults be revealed. As Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, early in the last century, “sunlight is the best disinfectant”.
Roger Watson was previously the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Advanced Nursing, published by Wiley, and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice, published by Elsevier. He is also an editorial board member of the WIkiJournal of Medicine. Niall McCrae was an editorial board member of Journal of Advanced Nursing.
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As I’ve said before, masking is a filthy habit and terrible for the environment. Why is this still even a thing?
What’s really attractive is seeing someone wearing a white surgical mask with a dark vertical line above the nose, showing where grubby fingers have pushed up on the mask for days/weeks/months on end. Thank you for keeping me safe….
Not only disgusting but everyday I find myself picking the revolting things up off the pavement. If people really believe this is a deadly disease why are they throwing their germs around the streets of Britain?
I am constantly amazed when I see someone wearing one with the top edge underneath the nose, (A jaunty style called the ‘Chinnian’), as if the virus only arrives in the body by mouth. What kind of mentality do you have to have for that.?
Viruses can also enter via the eyes. Masks, as my mother would say, are load of old hooey.
Or ears. Or scratches in the skin.
Or eyes. Best put blindfolds on, eh.
Or a plastic bag over the head.
Full body armour is needed me thinks.
Or rolling around inside a plastic ball.
I think that the plastic face visors are even more amusing, so long as you are heavily into schadenfreude.
As I understand it, they are duty bound to treat, so you can simply refuse to wear one. They will try to make you feel uncomfortable but will relent.
Make them feel uncomfortable back. Ask them if you can have this in writing with name signed and printed, their address (or position or whatever) and what exactly they are demanding. Take a photograph of them. Tell them they’ll be hearing from you…
NHS First; Do harm – masks – jabs lockdowns
Stand in the Park
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Make friends & keep sane
Elms Field
Wokingham RG40 2FE
(near Everyman Cinema and play area)
Dead right! I find them offensive and if anyone, including ( and in particular ) health professionals wore one when speaking with me I’d ask them to remove it.
I have asked health professionals to remove their masks so that I can understand them better – post infection cognitive issues – all the hospital clinical staff did remove theirs, my GP refused as it was for my safety! Processing speech without the visual cues of lip movements & facial expression wipes me out.
The staff who did remove theirs were only too glad to do so!
These My correlation is bigger than your correlation! debates need to end. It’s unacceptable to force people to hide their faces, muffle their voices and inhibit their breathing in public, no matter who believes what this will or will not also accomplish. People who are convinced they absolutely cannot live with other people having such extreme rights are free to change their gender (insofar necessary) and emigrate to Iran. End of story.
I agree. I don’t think masks work – and the “science” backs me on that – but honestly I would not wear one even if it could be proved they did.
I will second that tof.
Seriously, what science? Whenever somebody wants to make an important looking statement about face masking, he puts some statistic together which contains the correlations correlating with what he wants to say. Pro mask people have statistics with correlations they claim demonstrate that masks work, anti mask people have statistics with correlations claimed to show that they don’t and/or have harmful effects. Nothing of this qualifies as science, it’s just two tribes of opposing sages bombarding each other and the world with meaningless numbers.
Science is observing some hithero unexplained real-world phenomenon, formulating a theory to explain it based on the observation and then designing and conducting repeatable experiments supposed to prove or disprove the theory. At least with our present knowledge and technical abilities, designing and conducting repeatable experiments proving or disproving that such-and-such a thing causes or prevents an infection with something as miniscule and omnipresent as airborne, endemic viruses is simply not possible as we cannot reset living organisms into the state they were in before the experiment started after it was completed and have no reliable way to cause presence or absence of these viruses.
Handwaiving while chanting syllables of power (or rather, wielding spreadsheets with numbers of power) is not science.
I was referring to the numerous studies which all fail to show any benefit. Call them science, call them what you like, but my point is that the case for masks has not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, though because of the huge complication involved the whole area is difficult – too many factors.
I suggest to call them policy-based evidence making[*]. Or rather making of something which can be passed off as evidence.
[*] Ironically, the German RKI (Robert Koch Institute) claims to be in the exact business of doing that,
https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Institut/Ausbau_zum_Public-Health-Institut/RKI2025.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
as someone accidentally mistranslated the English produce evidence, put proofs in front of someone, into fabricate proofs.
Challenge: –
Explain how a (poorly fitting) cloth mask with pores around 70 nanometers diameter, can prevent passage of virions less than 1 nanometer in size.
This was pointed out at the start of the Covid scam and likened to the use of wiremesh fences to keep mosquitoes out.
Even accepted by WHO (until the dodgy contracts and brown envelopes for flying in masks from Turkey, China etc had been signed.)
Do your best. A convincing response may win you a banana.
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cHVsYXRlIGEgYmxvY2sgb2YgUkZDODIyLWxpa2UgZmllbGRzCg==
This is the output of apropos man | head -n 10
base64 encoded and it’s absolutely a good as any other kind of shit someone with more fantasy than creativity can make up. Please feel free to use it as reason for or against anything you want to support or oppose.
Thing is, we never saw this public masking before the shamdemic. If this virus ever was a serious threat, it has now at any rate ceased to be. Has anything changed to make the current situation different to 2019, apart from psychologically?
Oh, we did. In the middle ages, so-called plague doctors used masks to try to avoid succumbing to the plague. This didn’t work and the practice was again discarded. Until a Chinese guy called Wu (you couldn’t make this up) managed to convince himself that masks must work against the plague in 1911 (during the so-called Manchurian Plague). This then convinced our (still) boombaby overlords that another valid and pleasingly exotic (imagine it’s from China!) alternate truth had been found and hence, we were unkindly asked (or rather, harshly ordered) to forget what had been common knowledge for the last 600 years.
They proved with the jabathon that they are not interested in the best outcomes for their patients. Quite simply, there are far too many NHS employees who think the service exists for their benefit and see patients not as paying customers but as a massive inconvenience.
Quite right.
Like those bus drivers who are happy to drive a bus but hate picking up passengers. A few are to be found in every city.
“there are far too many NHS employees who think the service exists for their benefit“
But that’s just it – it does (like all other nationalised industries)
The article’s photo helps me identify seven idiots I hope I need never meet, let alone depend upon in any way, let alone for my health and wellbeing (mental and physical).
About to break into a high energy “Jeruselama”, routine by the looks of it.
I’ll be honest, the stupidest thing I saw today was when I went to an exhibition and outside the loos was a sign that read, “Please use before entering the toilets”, next to a big bottle of hand sanitizer. I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t have seen that pre-Covid and it just seemed to sum up the Clown World, topsy turvey reality that we all unfortunately must deal with. But not a single muzzle was spied ( not even on the 3 chahuahuas being pushed around in a buggy ) so that was a reasonable trade-off.
Maybe it was the modern version of the old engineers joke that you could always tell an engineer, because they were the ones who washed their hands before having a shit.
My GP surgery in Wales still insists everyone wears a mask when coming into the building, and the reception staff are pretty aggressive about enforcing the rule.
I’m not sure, though, whether the nurses and doctors in the surgery could refuse to see a patient who refuses to wear a mask.
And even if in theory they shouldn’t refuse, I’m not sure what a patient could do to force the issue if they were refused an appointment in practice.
Has anyone on this site challenged such GP rules successfully where they live?
Absolutely.
Tell ’em you are exempt.
That should suffice.
I remember two instances where I had to go further, both in the District Hospital.
The first was the kind official who said that without a mask I must stand 2m away from her screen. I, of course, complied but made a performance of not being able to hear / understand her. She tired of this dumb show before I did.
In the other instance, I was curtly reminded that “We do have Covid cases in here, you know!”, to which I responded “Well, I never! Who would have thought it. Sick people in a hospital! Do you also have ladies who are pregnant and due to give birth, in another ward, perhaps?”
She didn’t persist.
Many thanks for your reply, and I’m v impressed with your determination to resist this particularly stupid ‘health’ measure!
It’s happening again because only a very small proportion of the general public read beyond the headlines, which are produced by institutions that refuse to tell the truth, presumably because they fear they’ll lose their funding (by Gates/Soros/whoever).
I have now written twice to the CEO of Bedford NHS Trust (David Carter) asking him for the rationale behind forcing people to wear masks in hospitals and GPs surgeries and………..
Surely the sunk cost fallacy with regard to all the PPE that is still unused and being stored somewhere – what better way to get rid of it than persuade everyone that they need to use it?
The Mask re introduction is just an excuse a cover if you will excuse the pun for an NHS that is so incompetent, so utterly self absorbed in keeping itself fully stocked up with tax payers cash, without supplying anything other than a 3rd world service, it has cunningly found a blame. Us, If we don’t wear a bit of cloth over our faces when entering its hallowed halls of death, we are the ones responsible for its inability to perform, the bit of dirty cloth on your face is according to the NHS the best medicine, the cure all and preventative for all diseases, and if not worn then its our fault that the system is breaking down.
We own the NHS, we decide, its unfit for purpose, its management structure and people couldn’t manage a sh– flow in a sewer, so deny them their excuse, refuse the cloth covering and sue those who have the temerity to treat us as saps.
Typical NHS behaviour. Two pig ignorant administrators in positions of such authority that they can make bovine faeces decisions in the total absence of any empirical evidence and absolutely nobody with the relevant clinical expertise can challenge these thickos.
This must be why “the NHS is the envy of the world” Ho, feckin ho ho.
Surgeon tells it like it is…
Save the image I posted below. And bookmark this
https://brownstone.org/articles/studies-and-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
“More than 170 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms”
The tale of the young lady on GB News this week who has hounded by 11 hospital staff members, threatened with being dragged out and the police called because she refused to wear a silly mask with 650-micron holes in it. (A micron is a micro millimetre, or one thousandth of a millimetre)———–The virus is only 5 microns so will and does easily pass through the mask. Imagine throwing 100 snooker balls at some scaffolding. Sure a few balls may hit a pole but most will go straight through. ———–We now live in age where “official science” masquerades as “science” and it is used in a kind of scientific dictatorship where no questions are permitted, and we must simply obey. Just like the “official science” regarding climate. The climate we are told is changing due to humans and that is the end of that discussion. No questions are permitted. Even when the facts don’t fit the theory, which is mostly all of the time, we must all pretend that they do, or we will be dragged out into the street in the case of the young lady on GB news, or have not a rag left on us because we are “climate deniers”, one of the most truly unscientific and infantile terms ever.
Just refuse. My GP receptionist asked if I would wear a mask and I said no. Nothing more was said. At a hospital for tests, the letter said masks must be worn, there were signs everywhere saying they must be worn and everybody was wearing them. I didn’t and nobody said a word. Be brave otherwise the government wins.
FOIA request for their so-called evidence, me thinks.