The scientific community is still censoring Covid heretics
Last year a prestigious scientific journal invited me and a colleague, Professor Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, to prepare a scholarly paper summarising the evidence that Covid began with a laboratory accident in Wuhan.
We did so, writing a 5,000-word paper with 91 references. The journal summarily rejected it.
We revised it and tried another journal: same result. And again: ditto.
None of the reasons given by the peer reviewers made much sense – some were simply false. 'It is unfair to speculate on where the virus has arisen unless there is solid evidence – currently, there is none,' wrote one editor.
Yet paper after paper rejecting a lab leak or exploring the flimsy evidence for a seafood-market origin of the virus has sailed through peer review and into prestigious journals. It was clear that their objection to our paper was political: peer reviewers just did not want to see the hypothesis in print because that would admit there was a debate.
Peer review, supposedly the gold standard of scientific respectability, is increasingly a fraud. On the one hand it takes the form of 'pal review' in which scientists usher their chums' papers into print with barely a glance, let alone a request to see the underlying data.
That way all sorts of fakes and mistakes get published unchecked. About a third of all biomedical papers later prove impossible to replicate. It took a student at Stanford to point out that published papers on Alzheimer's from the president of his university, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had fraudulent errors, misleading the whole field: Tessier-Lavigne resigned. So peer approval is no guarantee of truth.
On the other hand, peer review takes the form of gatekeeping, in which scientists make sure that others' papers never see the light of day. 'Kevin and I will keep them out somehow,' wrote Phil Jones in an email that later leaked, referring to climate-sceptic papers, 'even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!'
Yet 10 years after that 'climategate' episode, exactly the same peer-review tricks to enforce orthodox dogma were employed in Covid. So peer rejection is no guarantee of untruth.
Part of the problem is anonymity. Peer reviewers get to keep their identities secret, but the authors of papers don't. That is a recipe for vindictive behaviour.
By keeping heretics out of the literature, the dogmatists can then claim that there is no dissent and a 'consensus' has formed.
That this is a circular argument usually passes gullible journalists by. And they waive the need for peer review when the conclusion of a paper suits their politics. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used to boast that it only considered peer-reviewed papers – until it was caught citing sources from activist press releases.
Grant applications too are filtered by biased peer reviewers. Heretics who challenge dogmas, on the causes of stomach ulcers, Alzheimer's or climate change, have all been denied funding by the high priests of consensus. With narrowing sources of scientific funding, how is the next Darwin, Einstein or Crick ever going to challenge conventional wisdom? Science, said the physicist Richard Feynman, is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Peer review is a fairly recent invention. Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 was never peer reviewed.
The system should be replaced by a much simpler procedure: post-publication review. Scientists can publish papers online and let lots of readers pick them apart. That's what we have done with ours.
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