I have written several articles over the past three years in the Gem State Patriot (GSP) about how political narratives have corrupted the dissemination of information in the scientific literature and media. The “scientific process” is corrupted by Government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The National Institute of Health (NIH), or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or by private Fortune 500 companies like Johnson and Johnson (J&J) or Merck (MCK), when grants or stock options are offered to scientists who conduct research on vaccines or therapeutics to which the company or government agency writing the grant have a vested financial interest.
This process of “scientific corruption” has been extended into the fields of climatology and even civil engineering and educational research with grants being offered to companies doing research in irrigation water capture or transgender classroom learning.
I learned of this process in my second year of post graduate education, when the head of the department of microbiology issued a directive that all government and private grant application abstracts be issued with the department head’s—the person who wrote the directive, name as the lead author! No matter who did the research. This today is common practice. What I know now and learned then was that in academic medicine it is “publish” or perish”. Not only is the grant money not going to the person doing the research—Master’s and PhD. candidates or medical students, residents and Fellows who write the articles, but Department heads get the credit in publications that they may even sit on the peer review committee.
Department heads review each other’s articles for publications the research having been done not by them, but by junior members in other departments. They skim a little off the university check, and if they play the game correctly with a public company, they may even get some offers of stock options or a couple of trips to Mexico. If the results of the research aren’t favorable to the grantor—future grants dry up, or stock options evaporate or no March in Cancun.
Why were senior administrators at (NIH) or (CDC) allowed to own stock and most incredibly options that can be exercised with a report in a reputable journal where the researcher sits on the peer review board? Companies that provide research grants to government agencies are not only charged with regulating industry, but also charged with reviewing research results and peer review data.
The pressure of a preapproved political narrative is not only ubiquitous in all parts of our society, but when citizens lack discernment and even common sense and a media fails to investigate process and claims, there develops laziness in research and a distrust by WE THE PEOPLE in the process.
Let’s switch to CLIMATE CHANGE-that used to be called “global warming”. As reported in the October 2nd Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in an article written by Allysia Finley Patrick Brown the climate director at the BREAKTHROUGH INSTITITUE acknowledged that he censored one of his articles to increase the chance of its’ being published. His study on the impact of California wildfires on climate change “diluted the data” in order to increase the chance of the article being published in Journals like NATURE and SCIENCE. The story they wanted to tell didn’t fit the data!
In an earlier article that I wrote for the (GSP) and in the (WSJ) article mentioned above Stanford Epidemiologist John Ioannidis wrote in 2005 an essay entitled ‘Why most published research Findings are False” In the same article he went on to say, “the greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true”. He concluded his paper with this statement—”Many otherwise seemingly independent university {or clinical trials jml} based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians or researchers qualifications for promotion {or pay jml}, tenure, {or access to future revenue streams jml}—think stock options or expensive vacations.
There has been a large body of research that has been rejected by mainstream scientific and academic journals because it doesn’t conform to a predetermined political narrative. In a January of 2022 Johns Hopkins letter, economist Steven Hanke reported that he couldn’t find a journal to print his data proving that Covid lockdowns had little effect on overall deaths. Same story with research done by VINAY Prasad from the University of San Francisco showing that the mask mandate had little impact on reducing transmission or disease rates or morbidity in Boston school age children.
If clinicians, public health specialists, and even former Supreme Court Justices want to exercise their right to free speech and opine about Covid mitigation and treatment strategies, please feel free to continue expressing your own opinions. With all due respect please try hard to divorce yourselves from conforming to a political narrative that like all scientific theories is “subject to change”—unless you believe in such a thing as “settled science”.
If the various sides of the Covid debate are really serious about decoupling the political process from the scientific method maybe we can all agree to have a Covid Review Board conduct a review of both mitigation and treatment strategies. Morbidity and mortality reviews and “out briefs” were once the order of the day in medicine for almost 120 years. Instead, those at all levels of government and in hospital administration have returned to writing articles in the media and even writing their own books about their own “experience on the death star”. I guess they could write an article for a ‘peer review journal’ and have one of their buddies do the “peer review”. Are editors at publishing houses any less qualified than the good old boy “peer reviewers”?
I know many of my readers find it difficult to believe that I proofread my articles, but after proofreading my article, doesn’t it really come down to one simple rule that applies to everyone? WE THE PEOPLE, politicians, professors in high places, and at least occasionally those in the media please JUST TELL THE TRUTH—THE WHOLE TRUTH. Don’t leave anything out even if the data tell a story that doesn’t fit a narrative that you have been married to for an entire professional career. We are all in a big pile of carbonaceous compost if the truth is no longer relevant. Nothing works without the truth. Government, courts, science schools, families, churches—nothing.
