READERS of TCW may not have encountered the Retraction Watch website. First launched in August 2010 by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, this website has become the ‘go-to’ place for news of who has been naughty and who has been nice in scientific publication.
Retraction is the act, by a publisher, of retracting an already published article based on either genuine and unintentional error or deliberately unethical practice. The latter can arise from ethical misconduct of research or a violation of publication ethics, for example, by plagiarism or fabrication and falsification of results.
For people like me, who edit an academic journal in our field, Retraction Watch has become an invaluable resource. As editors, we try to keep out of it by ensuring that we implement the highest standards in our peer reviews and editing processes. However, I have had the experience of reporting to Retraction Watch and liaising with them to expose one author who had published the same manuscript, known as duplication, in several journals simultaneously. Such is the power of Retraction Watch that the academic in question is no longer an academic.
The plethora of retractions of covid papers has been tracked closely by Retraction Watch and, while I greatly admire the work they do, they have most definitely been on one side of the covid narrative. Unlike in any other area of investigation, they curate a special list of retractions of covid-related studies. To date, there have been 509 retractions and 20 expressions of concern. As the database only covers published articles, this does not include the hundreds of articles on covid removed from pre-print servers where authors share their work prior to publication in a journal.
To be fair, covid-related articles have been retracted for many reasons and the retracted articles fall on both sides of the narrative. Nevertheless, a quick scan of the list of retracted covid studies quickly shows you that studies critical of the covid narrative and studies on ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine predominate.
Retraction Watch has been assiduous in running an article every time French researcher Didier Raoult, a proponent of hydroxychloroquine, has a retraction and they rejoice in exposing him and others in that field when they have articles retracted. One gets the impression that there is less rejoicing in Heaven over one sinner who repents than there is at Retraction Watch when another covid paper critical of the prevailing narrative is retracted.
Naturally, the purported covid ‘vaccines’ have caught the eye of Retraction Watch and, while there is not a specific list related to covid vaccine articles, a quick search of their website shows which side of their toast the Bovril is on. The following serve to illustrate: ‘Paper claiming “extensive” harms of COVID-19 vaccines to be retracted’; ‘“Conclusions related to vaccine safety are not validated”: COVID-19 spike protein paper retracted’; and ‘AHA journal tones down abstract linking COVID-19 vaccines to risk of heart problems.’ Again, less rejoicing…
A recent story, to which our attention was drawn in the excellent Substack Where are the numbers? by Professors Norman Fenton and Martin Neil, exemplifies this. Their article of February 27 featured a report on the Substack Unacceptable Jessica by Dr Jessica Rose. Dr Rose recounts in the entry how an article on covid vaccine harms, previously featured on Retraction Watch has, after much revision and many submission efforts, been accepted by the journal Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety. The article, Determinants of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis, was published on January 27 and, within a month, has received 52 anonymous expressions of concern and is in imminent danger of being retracted again. It is almost as if the pro-covid vaccine lobby was organised.
This brings us to a very interesting guest post on Retraction Watch of February 26 by Loren K. Mell, titled: ‘If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it’. First, I must express my admiration for Marcus and Oransky for deciding to publish this. It is highly critical of their criticism of an article on the link between vaccines and autism. In the same vein, I must also express admiration for the author of the guest post as, while he is implacably pro-vaccine and also unconvinced about the link to autism, he is not happy to simply take the original article by the Retraction Watch editors as support for his views. The reason is that their scientific logic was flawed.
The article by Marcus and Oransky, titled: ‘The Scientific Literature Can’t Save You Now’ and published in The Atlantic was specifically aimed at the new US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who cited a particular article by Anthony Mawson and Binu Jacob purporting to demonstrate a link between vaccines and autism.
The line taken by Marcus and Oransky was an ad hominem attack on the status of the authors, one of whom is no longer an academic, and a denigration of the journal where the article appeared, Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law. Admittedly, the journal is not in the first division of journals, but this probably reflects the difficulty of publishing such research in more prestigious journals. The work was peer reviewed.
To the credit of Loren K. Mell, he gets right to the heart of the problem that people critical of the vaccine narrative, not only the covid vaccine narrative, face in publishing vaccine critical research results: minds have already been made up by most publishers, editors, reviewers and, it appears, Retraction Watch. In Mell’s own words, he says that Marcus and Oransky take the view that: ‘the hypothesis Mawson and Jacob investigate has already been “thoroughly debunked” and is therefore pointless to question’.
Mell goes on to ask if Marcus and Oransky believe no investigators should ever study if there are links between any vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. As he points out, nothing in this field can even be certain as ‘it is nigh impossible to prove scientifically that a hypothesized association doesn’t exist’. He also asks if they would extend their view to every newly developed vaccine, and what should happen ‘if someone’s findings don’t align with what is already “known”? Should they be tossed out? Buried?’
This may seem like a storm in an academic teacup, but it shows how even good people (Marcus and Oransky) can lose all sense of propriety and rigour when it comes to vaccines, especially if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the person expressing something they don’t agree with.
