Only two days after the Journal of the Academy of Public Health‘s official launch, Science Magazine criticised it in a news item. A scientist I had recommended as a member of our Academy wrote to me that the fact that Science feared our new journal suggested that we were on the right track.
Indeed. Science scored an own goal by illustrating so clearly what is wrong with the legacy media and traditional scientific journals. It started out with denigrating remarks about the journal being the brainchild of President Donald Trump’s pick to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff “who became known for his opposition to lockdowns, child vaccination, and other public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its editorial board also includes Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty [wrongly spelled as Martin] Makary, who also opposed vaccine mandates.”
Why did Science mention that Trump picked Jay and Marty? This is irrelevant for any scientific judgments about these people. And what was wrong with their positions during the pandemic? Nothing.
Sweden did not lock down and yet had one of the lowest mortalities in the world. To vaccinate children against COVID-19 down to 6 months of age as in USA is highly likely harmful, and we have not recommended this in Europe. Many people, me included, have argued against vaccine mandates and it was never a requirement in Denmark to become vaccinated against COVID-19. Such mandates are ethically and scientifically indefensible and can increase vaccine hesitancy for vaccines in general.
Science’s denigration continued: “The journal, which has already published eight articles on topics including COVID-19 vaccine trials and mask mandates, eschews several aspects of traditional publishing. It lacks a subscription paywall.”
“Lacks” a paywall? This is a negative statement, although it is positive not to have a paywall like Science has. And mask mandates? There is no need to mandate whole populations to dress as bank robbers given masking’s tenuous – and potentially nonexistent – benefits on a population level.
Since only members of the Academy of Public Health can submit articles, Science is worried that the journal will be used “to sow doubt about scientific consensus on matters such as vaccine efficacy and safety.”
Scientific consensus is rare, and even when it exists, it has often been proven wrong by later research. Science is the opposite of consensus. The status quo should be challenged, and free scientific debate – that so many traditional journals have suppressed – moves science forward. There are many good reasons why some top scientists have abandoned publishing in top scientific journals, and they include censorship, and financial and other conflicts of interest among anonymous peer reviewers, editors and journal owners.
All my life, I have produced numerous scientific results that went against the so-called scientific consensus, and when my opponents had no valid counterarguments, they called me controversial. I realised that this denigrating term always meant that my results threatened financial or other conflicts of interest, not least guild interests. When my statistician and I had demonstrated in 1999 that mammography screening might do more harm than good, which I have confirmed many times ever since, a journalist wrote that there is nothing that hurts like the truth about healthcare.
It is not enough for Science to cast doubt about our new journal by referring to Trump: “JAPH is a nonprofit subsidiary of the Real Clear Foundation, itself a donor-financed nonprofit that has attracted support from major funders of conservative causes, according to The New York Times. Kulldorff and many other members of the 21-person editorial board have attracted criticism for their views and research during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Ah well, I am one of these 21 people and I know many of the others. We are anything but conservative. We try to keep an open mind and are not easily fooled by fraudsters. In 2023, I explained that the origin of COVID-19 is the biggest cover up in medical history. And on 31 January 2025, I tweeted: “The CIA said Saturday that it’s more likely a lab leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic than an infected animal that spread the virus to people. They are very slow at the CIA. I have known this for five years and have written a lot about it incl a whole book.”
Science lamented that Jay, Martin and Sunetra Gupta, also an editorial board member, authored the Great Barrington Declaration that opposed lockdowns. But yet again, they were right and Science and most other journals were wrong.
Science said that Jay and John Ioannidis, the most cited medical scientist and another board member, “drew fire in 2020 for a study that claimed SARS-CoV-2 had infected far more people than currently thought, and was therefore far less dangerous than assumed.” This was totally misleading. Jay has explained how they were exposed to inappropriate attacks and censorship from Stanford where they worked. Their initial results, that the infection fatality rate was only 0.2%, were reproduced in other studies.
They first published their results as a preprint, in April 2020. If their results had been accepted at the time, instead of being roundly condemned, also in the media, the draconian lockdowns could have been avoided, as they showed that the virus spread very rapidly.
Science and the COVID-19 pandemic
Since Science criticised us so heavily for our COVID research and views, even though we were correct, we should look at what Science’s own role has been. It claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines are 100% effective against severe disease, which wasn’t even correct when Science made the claim because we knew that respiratory viruses mutate fast.
I wrote in my book, The Chinese virus, that Beijing’s useful idiots included Science, which was overly friendly with Peter Daszak – whose EcoHealth Alliance channelled an NIH grant to Wuhan to fund the highly dangerous gain-of-function research, which he denied.
In February 2020, Science reported that scientists “strongly condemn” rumours and conspiracy theories about the origin of the pandemic. If you have no arguments, you raise your voice. This sentence does not belong in a scientific journal but in a tabloid, and it cannot be a conspiracy theory to suggest that the virus escaped from a lab and was likely manufactured there. In the same article, Daszak said that “We’re in the midst of the social media misinformation age,” but forgot to say he was the main driver of it.
In 2020, researchers sent a modelling study to Science arguing that herd immunity would be achieved earlier than the usual estimates of an infection rate of 60-80% of the population. Science admitted that the paper was rejected for political reasons: “Given the implications for public health, it is appropriate to hold claims around the herd immunity threshold to a very high evidence bar, as these would be interpreted to justify relaxation of interventions, potentially placing people at risk.” Science was concerned that opponents of lockdown would use the paper to undermine the policy. The lead author said she might leave the field because every paper she had written on this issue had been rejected with the claim that it was not useful or new.
In November 2021, Science published an almost 5,000-word article about Daszak that told nothing new. A reporter had spent seven hours with Daszak to put a nice gloss on him. A photo of Daszak appeared on Science’s front page with the title of the article: Prophet in purgatory: Peter Daszak is fighting accusations that his work on the pandemic prevention helped spark COVID-19.
Science published this when the death toll was about 6 million and depicted Daszak as a hero who works on preventing pandemics when it is extremely likely that he and “the bat lady,” Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, created one, which he had covered up for in two years.
Science didn’t care much about conflicts of interest either. When NIH’s David Morens praised Daszak, they didn’t tell the readers that he was Daszak’s funder, colleague and co-author. Science mentioned that Freedom of Information Act requests by the US Right to Know and others had uncovered inconvenient truths, but it used Angela Rasmussen to dismiss this as “weaponized FOIA requests.” She was the one who, in Nature Medicine, called it a world-wide conspiracy when people discussed a possible lab leak. It is still the case that there is not a thread of good evidence that the virus has a natural origin but a lot that tells us it was produced in a laboratory in Wuhan.
Wait and see
In the Science article, Kulldorff said that people had a right to be worried about what might happen and added that our journal should be judged on its output a year or more from now, once it’s more established. I agree. I am very enthusiastic about the journal. And this is not because I cannot publish in traditional journals. I am the only Dane that has over 100 publications in “the big five” (BMJ, The Lancet, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine).
Disclosures, Funding & Conflicts of Interest
None.
Affiliations:
Peter C Gøtzsche, Professor emeritus, Institute for Scientific Freedom, Copenhagen, DK
This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.
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It’s hard to imagine a more selfish take on a competitor.
Indeed. “Gatekeeper demands stronger gate and the banning of discussion because Science!”.
You actually have to thank the Science magazine for it’s attack, the Journal’s presence stings and they couldn’t have made a more foolish decision than bringing it’s existence to everyone’s attention. I’m shure that some of Science’s subscribers are not toyally brainwashed and can read between the lines.
tack, tacka, tack så mycket
…they couldn’t have made a more foolish decision than bringing it’s existence to everyone’s attention.
I believe this is referred to as the Streisand effect. 🙂
The science publications are often controlled by peer review gatekeepers that turn out to be idiots. Peter Higgs could not get published because his theory restored something that looked like the old classical physics called a luminiferous ether. Physicists had spent decades showing classical physics was wrong and this did not fit the story they wanted to spin.
The thing was the Higgs field, as also the vacuum sea in general was completely built on the standard model and only had layman approximation to a classical luminiferous ether. The idiots who controlled the peer review in publication felt they had to try and block publication because it was retrograde idea but it was them lacking the physics knowledge to make a proper decision that it ultimately highlighted.
Applies practically verbatim to climate journals.
Has anyone actually read what the Science article? First of all Sweden did partially lockdown, secondary (high) schools were closed. People were actively encouraged to work from home. The Great Barrington Declaration could not work as it’s all but impossible to get herd immunity against COVID as SARS-CoV-2 has a short incubation period, which means an infected person can be infectious before having symptoms. Look at the outbreak of measles in Texas, that requires a 95% vaccination rate to prevent the spread, and that’s a virus with a 14 day incubation period.
What did happen with SARS-CoV-2 was it killed the most vulnerable very early, mostly people with other conditions they were close to dying from. It also got a lot of people with lung and breathing problems. Then there were the people who for various reasons had severe immune over-reactions to a common cold virus. That was larger than the typical number of people every year who die from viruses that for the majority cause little or no symptoms.
Its rapid mutation has been its undoing, same as it was for the earlier SARS-CoV virus. Same story with most rapid mutating viruses. They hit on a genetic combination that enables them to infect human or animal hosts, and in a large number of hosts they can replicate in large numbers and easily spread. But in every host as the viruses replicate, they change. Those changes could make them deadlier, could make them less potent. A virus that mutates to be too deadly, too quickly, self-limits its ability to spread. Who dies from SARS-CoV-2 now? It got the most vulnerable. Almost everyone has been exposed to one or more variant mutations of it.
Ebola and other hemorrhagic viruses have also followed a path like this. Years ago Ebola was very feared because while outbreaks were rare, they spread rapidly and almost everyone who got it died or had health problems if they survived. But that self limited its ability to widely spread, victims succumbed too quickly to be able to travel far and spread the virus.
More recent Ebola outbreaks have spread farther, due to both improved transportation in some areas that have had outbreaks, and to the virus becoming a slower killer so people can get around before they even know they’re infected. But by being less deadly it’s possible for more victims to survive long enough to receive effective treatment.
I was bored and had some time so clicked on the link and read the Science article.
I noted that the “no paywall” extract in the ATL article was actually truncated. Extending beyond the ATL version there is :
Having people be able to check whether (or not) the criticisms from the chosen peer reviewers are justified ?!? Are you insane ???
Actually acknowledging that “peer review” takes time and effort from the reviewers, and should be considered as “work” ?!? The horror !
Actually paying people (workers) for “work” instead of insisting they do the “work” for free (slaves) … but that would reduce the amount of gravy on the gravy train for us ! ! !
posts peer reviews alongside published articles
Why would that be a bad thing?
Makes it hard for reviewers to use bogus arguments to suppress views they disagree with. For those who envision themselves as “gatekeepers” of truth, that is bad.
My apologies, a variant of “Poe’s Law” applies here.
I trowelled on a layer of sarcasm so thick in my post that it masked the fact that I personally think that including peer reviews, even anonymously, with scientific papers would actually be a good thing.
As my namesake “MarkW” wrote using other words, it allows for the peer reviewers (especially their objections / arguments / reasoning / …) to be “peer reviewed” in addition to the paper itself.
Mark, I think I understood pretty well where you were coming from! I pulled that particular statement out of the quote because it appears the magazine is trying to say it’s bad.
I don’t see how greater transparency in the process could possibly be bad. Says a lot about them that they appear to think it is.
John, I am guilty, I did not pay for the Science article, nor did I read it.
So how do you explain how we treat covid now everybody basically ignores it and treats it as flu.
There is no herd immunity most of us had our last jab over 2 years ago. The only difference is those at risk are given retro virals.
Western Australia publishes figures still every week that is last weeks
https://www.health.wa.gov.au/~/media/Corp/Documents/Health-for/Infectious-disease/VirusWAtch/2025/20250316-virus_watch.pdf
You can see 172 cases actually bothered to get tested for covid probably because they were in at risk group. The number would be far more than that who got it yet we don’t lock the state down and it doesn’t even make the news.
However we do have a 500 bed facility that sits idle
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-16/bullsbrook-covid-facility-used-housing-crisis/104923786
We also still have deaths attributed as covid
https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/deaths-due-covid-19-influenza-and-rsv-australia-2022-january-2025
The lockdowns came with a huge cost and it is a valid open question was it worth it.
We have five years of hindsight, in which everyone has a PhD. Certainly in the U.K. we have legislation that gives different organisations the authority to close schools, close leisure facilities, close ports of entry and other measures in the event of a notifiable disease, which includes measles, COVID and campylobacter. Obviously campylobacter is going to have only a small footprint, but measles and COVID amongst others could have a much bigger footprint. Don’t forget that the U.K. has a population about 22% of that of the USA in an area about 30% the size of Texas. Taking where i live as the centre of a circle with a radius of 30 miles, then there are five cities with populations ranging from 250000 to 2 million people, it also covers multiple local authorities. If each local authority invoked or didn’t invoke the legislation mentioned above in response to COVID then there would have been a mosaic of responses depending on the perceived risk. Also the location of medical facilities and the possibility of patients from one county being sent to a hospital in an adjacent county where there may have been different rules in place. The nearest city in the county where i live was kept in lockdown after the rest of England had had their restrictions relaxed. According to data collected in 2020 approximately 7% of all admissions to paediatric intensive care units were COVID related. It wasn’t necessarily the mortality rate but the morbidity rate that needed to be assessed.
The other aspect that needs to be considered is the demographics of each country, not only in terms of age but ethnicity as well, not every ethnic population has the same immune response to a given pathogen, even within a given population individuals will vary.
I agree with all that but it does leave open the question did we over-react and could we do different next time.
Shoot yourself and your loved ones up with whatever poison Big Pharma is pushing at the minute. Just don’t make it compulsory or restrict my liberty based on your fealty to “experts.”
Science Magazine Unfairly Attacks the Journal of the Academy of Public Health
In a rational world Science Magazine might criticise a paper or even the decision to publish it, but ad-homs of a sort shout out petulance and even entitlement.
How many papers published in Science Magazine have been “corrected” or even retracted?
From the article: “Science is the opposite of consensus. The status quo should be challenged,”
Science magazine (among others) is a defender of the consensus.
That’s not science.
Amazing that Science would complain about the lack of a paywall. I suppose a paywall adds to their elite, priest like status.
The Guardian is so committed to the cause that it loses tens of millions every year….
“Employees at The Guardian are preparing for cost cuts as the newspaper warned it is forecast to make a £39m loss.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/02/11/cost-cuts-loom-at-the-guardian-amid-widening-losses/
Still, the editor’s husband [Adrian Chiles*] still has his regular column…
Adrian Chiles: Star was on the brink of liver disease due to alcohol – ‘cannot carry on’
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1614227/adrian-chiles-health-alcohol-health-risks-cancer-stroke-heart-disease
Christ, what a bunch.
And their bank accounts.
And their ability to control the narrative.
As an aggregator, RealClearPolitics and the rest of RealClear Holdings tend to be fairly neutral, which I suppose makes them “conservative”.
According to the left, being neutral means they’re far-right extremists
Peter Gøtzsche should publish his commentary as an editorial in the Journal of the Academy of Public Health.
In publishing the editorial, the the favor of Francis Collins should be returned, namely Prof. Gøtzsche should note that in fostering propaganda and biased publishing, Science has become a fringe journal.
In view of the facts of the matter, this is a fair judgement.
I disagree. I think JAPH should be vocal but polite, which would really piss off Science
Reminds me of the Biblical passage, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Seems today the sinners get to toss more than one.
doubt about scientific consensus ????
Doubt IS the scientific method. The ‘scientific consensus’ is the illegitimate child of know-nothings who think if they say ‘science’ they’re some sort of authorities. Real science insists on perpetual skepticism and real evidence behind any declaration. It is not settled, as these twerps think, by majority vote.
Science magazine has become largely a political mouthpiece, with an occasional article of value. The editor reminds me of the British PM, clueless.
You’re being too kind to Starmer
Bravo! Well done, well said.
Very nice.