How Shadowy Forces Control What Science Gets Published | SettingBrushFires
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Modern science relies on open inquiry, active discussion, and a never ending pursuit of truth. At least that’s what we’ve been told. But these days there are powerful information cartels controlling what gets funded, what gets studied, and what gets published. We live in an era of scientific gatekeepers dictating what science is allowed to say, and the global organization that claim to own the science. The most recent example involves a retraction of the first peer reviewed article calling for a global moratorium on the COVID-19 genetic shots.
In today’s segment, we’re going to explore how the scientific publication process works and how it can be corrupted in the era of information warfare. Does peer review still work? Hello everyone, and welcome to Fallout. So today let’s talk about this paper that’s been retracted, that was put together by this really a team, a list team of authors that have been in the opposition to the narrative. And the lead author is Nathaniel Mead, Jessica Rose, Stephanie Senf and Peter McCullough as senior authority for this peer reviewed article in the journal called Curious, titled COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, lessons learned from the registrational trials and global Vaccine campaign.
This is an amazing paper. Okay? It’s amazing. Not because a lot of what’s in there hasn’t been looked at, in many cases quite extensively already, right? What’s remarkable about it is it’s the first kind of summary of a whole lot of work that’s been done over a significant period of time, over years, that’s actually got published in a peer reviewed journal. Well, temporarily published, apparently. I agree. It’s comprehensive beyond its publication status and all of the shenanigans around that.
I think the authorship team really deserves a gold star for taking all of this information that’s gradually been disclosed over the last three years by so many different groups and players that have been examining the really malfeasance and manipulation. From my perspective, that’s my opinion of the clinical trials to get people to accept these products and to justify their rapid authorization under emergency use. And you know, we had the Canadian COVID Care alliance, we’ve had a number of different individuals over time in research groups that have all documented and disclosed these things in various ways, but it’s never been put together as a comprehensive narrative with almost 300 academic citation references included.
And then they managed to jam it through peer review over a period. It began in November, at the beginning of November of 23, and completed peer review in the end of January, as I recall, of 24. So that’s a robust period of peer review. Another thing that’s remarkable about it is it doesn’t have the standard caveat that so many authors have resorted to, usually in the abstract or in the discussion where they give this statement that these vaccines are safe and effective.
It’s been almost obligatory to state that the vaccines are safe and effective even when the data in the paper contradicts that, you still have to say it in order to get it through peer review. And here this team has come out with this amazing statement that calls for a halt in COVID-19 mass vaccination based on a valid evaluation of the evidence. So they managed to get it through and get it accepted for publication in a Springer journal.
It’s not nature most people don’t follow. This is kind of inside baseball ranking of journals. The term that’s used is an impact factor. So, for instance, nature scores in terms of its impact factor in the twenties, typically or maybe even higher. And this curious journal is relatively new and it has an impact factor between one and two. And normally when something gets published in a journal of this impact factor, and it might have something like two or 300 views within the first couple of months of publication, this one had 330,000.
Right, right. I mean, I think I saw that it was curiously right. I think I saw that the typical. No pun intended. That’s right. No, but so the typical paper, I think they were saying, gets about 3000 views and this is 100 times that. So probably the single biggest paper this curious is published. That’s right. And much like Pierre Khoury’s original ivermectin paper in Frontiers in pharmacology, that got such an astounding response just for publishing the abstract.
And then that triggered some third party interceding with the editor in chief of frontiers, advocating that that paper be withdrawn without actually even reading the paper. Just based on the abstract here, it appears that there was a retraction here based on some really sketchy feedback, some letters that someone sent in after it had been published, been through the peer review process, etcetera, and some random third parties wrote complaints.
Apparently you’ve been deeply involved in this peer review process. You actually had a journal that you actually had a vaccine journal once upon a time, right? So maybe like give us a little bit of that sense that you’re not looking at this as even someone who’s been subject to peer review, even someone who’s done it, who’s organized people to do it. And remember, there’s kind of two general categories of peer review.
There’s the peer review process involving grants and contracts. So that’s awarding the money initially. And then there’s the peer review process for publication, which is similar but a little bit different. And remember, the goal here in peer review is to ensure that in part the bias that may exist in a team of authors. And there’s always bias, there’s always conflict of interest. There’s a question, is it being managed well? And that’s the job of the editor, is to select peer reviewers that are going to ferret out bias and inaccuracies.
And what comes out of that, typically if you have a good editor who has selected a good team of reviewers, you end up with a greatly improved manuscript that intellectually, in some ways is a work product of both the authors and the peer reviewers. But strangely, in the current situation, the peer reviewers typically remain anonymous. So that creates some odd situations also where the peer reviewers might have an ax to grind.
They may wish to really make trouble for the author. So that’s another thing that the editor has to mediate and kind of protect against. Before we jump to kind of looking at the sort of the reasons for the retractions, let’s just quickly go through what they actually asserted here. It’s really quite conservative. Yeah, exactly. I mean, so they’re looking at, for example, problems with the methods, execution and reporting of the actual trials that were run.
So that’s one thing. Another thing is there were these statistically significant increases in serious adverse events, saes. Right. In the vaccine and categories of saes, death, cancer, cardiac events, autoimmune, hematologic, reproductive and neurologic disorders. And those have all been acknowledged by the CDC. This is something controversial. And this is all basically like a reanalysis of the original data that was used that was actually, you know, that’s officially available.
You know, obviously there’s a lot of toxicological testing that hasn’t been done. Yeah, right. David Gortler is when someone has been talking, and we knew about this with Byron Bridles obtaining the common technical document, the submitted ind essentially from the japanese server. That’s right. So there’s nothing shocking about those points. So there’s, you know, there’s a bunch of quality control issues. You know, this is the. Some of the stuff that Kevin McKernan brought up, these impurities, the DNA possible mechanisms underlining these adverse events that have been looked at.
And the huge thing, this is what we’ve been talking about even before the vaccines came out is the risk benefit, which the government has pretty much refused to stratify. Risk benefit. All they’ve given us is this propaganda talking point. These are safe and effective without defining what the heck they’re talking about. So, you know, talking about this risk benefit ratio, I can’t help but think of doctor Martin Koldorf, Harvard epidemiologist, you know, was put on hold after he wrote the great Barrington Declaration and refused to take the job himself.
Now he’s been fired. From what I understand, he has a peace and city journal that’s come out and, you know, essentially everything he did has turned out to be correct. But what’s relevant to the risk benefit ratio is, and he has two young children. He knew long before these jabs were out on the market or anything that his kids would never need to get it because he understood that the risk to his children was incredibly low.
And frankly, to young people in general, without these products even having been on the market, he knew that that risk benefit ratio was off. And this is one of the things that’s. So the risk benefit ratio calculations are one of the things that’s actually covered in this paper. Right. Which is something that the CDC and the FDA have steadfastly refused to provide us, despite multiple requests, including me speaking directly to Nancy Pelosi, asking that we have risk benefits stratified by age, which is what has always been the norm.
So, once again, risk benefit ratio is nothing controversial in a normal situation. And what the authors here are providing us is not revolutionary. It’s just good practice to disclose that information and the basis for it. Tell me about these reasons for the retraction. We know they got some correspondence. I mean, they got an incredible amount of viewership on this paper. And I think it was up for about a month.
You know, actually, I was speaking with Doctor Jessica Rose about this paper and she alerted me to the fact that it’s likely going to be retracted. There were kind of musings of this, but then I was checking and it seemed to still be up. So I taped. I taped a refresh on my page and I saw, you know, that the status had shifted in between the time I opened the paper and her assertions.
It’s kind of a bizarre thing to see. So are these assertions that they made about why this paper should be retracted, which apparently the editors accepted. Are they reasonable? They read like social media trollery. They read like the types of ad hominem attacks that have become normal within the medical community under the influence of shots heard around the world and these other organizations that have been sponsored to attack physicians that say things that go against the narrative relating to the public health management, whether it’s lockdowns, masks, vaccine safety and efficacy, any of these things.
If physicians would speak out against the promoted narrative, then they would typically get these kinds of comments from other physicians and medical practitioners and researchers in the field. And what we learned, in part because of a series of publications from epoch times backed by Freedom of Information act disclosures, is that this cyber stalking that’s been going on, this really gang stalking, has been sponsored and facilitated by the public good projects and the shots heard around the world organization, among others.
So what’s very odd about these comments is that they are very superficial. They aren’t presented in a serious fashion like you would if there was a formal critique of a paper. In a normal situation, you would expect a scholarly statement that was intentionally objective, non inflammatory, did not resort to ad hominem attacks on individuals in mischaracterization of their motive or other things, but rather a series of facts as asserted by the third party, saying that, well, technically this was mis cited because they should have cited Jones et al.
2022. Instead, they cited Peters et al. 2021. You know, that kind of very specific nuance would be what you’d expect if there was substantial criticism. But instead, what you got are these superficial ad hominem attacks. This is a pretty fantastic paper, and I’m still shocked. Well, to be honest, I was shocked that it was published in the first place because of all the suppression. Correct? Correct. And then I was shocked that it was retracted, because at first I was like, my God, these courageous peer reviewers, courageous journal editors, and then, oh, well, I guess it didn’t work out in the end, but it’s out there.
At least it’s out there, right? So it really does remind me of what transpired back in 2021, April of 2021, with this special edition of Frontiers in pharmacology that me and four others had put together to enable publications publication of information about drug repurposing to treat COVID. And a number of us that were involved in creating that special edition and going through all the bureaucracy, filing the forms, getting the approvals, etcetera, for this special edition had all experienced how difficult it was to publish information about drug repurposing to treat COVID.
And so we pulled this together, and I was one of the lead editors, and I had heard about the effectiveness of Ivermectin. I was very intrigued about that, starting with a number of individuals, but particularly Pierre Corey and Paul Merrick, had written an informal social media kind of review about clinical experience with ivermectin. And so I’d encouraged Pierre to take that and reformat it as an academic paper and submit it to our special edition.
To his credit, he did that together with Paul and a number of others, formatted as a formal academic manuscript, submitted it through our process, which was the frontiers in pharmacology process in 21. And I knew that it was going to be a hot topic, which is why I wanted it in my journal. As somebody who’s a journal editor, you want breaking new information that’s going to generate interest, which is why I’d solicited it, because this was important stuff.
What were the data supporting it? I carefully selected top drawer, bomb proof peer reviewers I solicited, and I had to call these people up and convince them and say, this is worth doing and spending your time on, because it takes a bunch of time for a peer reviewer to go through this stuff and write all this dialogue. And so I selected the person that was the most senior clinical reviewer at the FDA in biologics, and someone who was an immunologist, a viral immunologist, very experienced, who was working for the office of the director of the FDA, and someone who was a clinical pharmacologist, who had extensive experience in the Department of Defense with drug repurposing.
And we needed to have a real practicing clinician that was encountering COVID on the front lines. And so I solicited a reviewer who was an ICU doc, but had a science background also, who was in the front lines of treating COVID, I think, at Einstein in New York. So somebody who was just getting a lot of COVID coming through to review Pierre and Paul and the other authors manuscript.
And it went around and around and around. It was not gentle for Pierre. He had, I think, three or four rounds of review. The FDA ers in particular, were quite stern with him and demanding, and the outcome of that was a high quality product that had been subjected to fairly hostile third party assessment and feedback had been greatly improved. And afterwards, all the reviewers accepted it. I had to submit it to the overall editors for frontiers in pharmacology.
And they had allowed it for publication and had actually had Pierre send in the check, pay the money to support the publication costs a few hundred bucks. So Pierre had paid the money, and Frontiers and Pharmacology had the policy that they would put the abstract only up on their website for accepted publications. As soon as they were accepted, they would put out the abstract, and the abstract said very little about the methods or the statistical analysis or anything else.
And it had thousands and thousands and thousands of views and comments. Just like this paper, it generated a huge amount of interest. And just like this paper, some anonymous third party came in, remember, this is 2021, came in and complained not to the editors for our special section or the editor in chief for Frontiers in pharmacology, who is at UC Davis. I called her and said, what’s going on? And she didn’t know, but rather to the overall editor in chief of Frontiers.
And Frontiers, like Springer, the publisher of Curious, happens to be owned by a corporation that has deep ties to the world economic form, the WEF. And this plays into the whole assertion that the UN and the WEF own the science. So somebody complained to the overall head editor in chief, who called me up, read me the right act, acted as if I had somehow had a conflict of interest in brokering these reviews and absolutely wouldn’t hear from me anything otherwise, and insisted that this be withdrawn immediately.
And the thing that provoked it, just like these letters that apparently were sent in to curious, was some third party not involved in the peer review who hadn’t actually read the paper, only seen the abstraction, complaining to the editor in chief that this needs to be withdrawn because ivermectin is ineffective and this should not be published. And then after that happened, then suddenly they engaged in a process where they re reviewed all submitted papers to this special edition and started throwing those out, even though they’ve been accepted by peer review.
At which point myself and the other editors in 2021 resigned en masse. We just said, this is not acceptable. You know, we’ve acted in good faith, we’ve gone through the process as you’ve required us to do, and now you’re superseding second guessing based apparently on the topic area which you had previously approved. But now you appear to be having second thoughts about. And the point being that there is a clear arc that runs from what was perhaps one of the first examples of these arbitrary and capricious withdrawals of papers during the COVID crisis in 2021, specifically April 2021, through to this new paper in 2024.
We’ve got a problem with peer review. Now it’s compromised. And I can tell you personally, I don’t want to spend the time writing another scientific paper. I have exceptional papers that we, during the COVID crisis, uploaded onto preprint servers that went through multiple rounds of peer review. We could never get published. Still, and I’ve had various journals contact me now and say, oh, we’ve looked at this and we would love to publish this.
I have no enthusiasm for that, and I don’t know if I’ll ever write another academic paper. I completely disillusioned about what’s going on in modern academic, peer reviewed journals. They are clearly biased, clearly politicized, no longer objective, and have become some sort of bizarre competitive playground for information censorship and manipulation. And, you know, for these ones where recently, you know, journal editors have come and said, hey, we should actually put this through the peer review process, your basically expectation is that it’ll become a circus just like these others.
Yeah. For you folks, here’s the thing important to know about peer review. Originally, the way things worked back when science was still a little wet behind the ears, late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, is you would publish your paper and then your colleagues would comment on it after it was published. So you would write the paper, submit it to some journal from your society or whatever. It would get published, and then your colleagues would write letters to the editor and other commentary.
And that’s how peer reviewed happened. It happened after you put your ideas out. Then we went to this model where you did the review beforehand, and now we’re in a model that’s kind of like what’s happening with grants and contracts, where you go through this peer review process in theory, but then there’s a higher level of review that can be quite arbitrary and capricious, that has a political aspect that actually makes the decision.
The peer review process is just kind of a cover or a legitimizing activity that really doesn’t determine the overall outcome, that’s arbitrarily controlled by some higher authority that’s responding to political or economic pressure. And notoriously now that’s coming from these very large public private partnerships and investment groups that are determining what is allowed to be said in science, the term orthodoxy comes to mind, and Galileo comes to mind.
And so it also the Catholic Church functioning in that case as akin to the senior editors of these journals and the people that are controlling them. So as we finish up for today, I can’t help but think about the importance of these parallel structures. We’ve talked about this a number of times, both off camera and on. And so there’s probably room for. For an exceptional journal that actually focuses on assessing the scientific method that someone has applied and whether the work is rigorous.
And I imagine it would actually be incredibly well received. If it can survive the slings and arrows it’s going to face, people don’t. And I’ve had a number of people come to me saying, Robert, you must do this. In the list of things that I must do for the good of humanity or whatever, lead the formation of such a journal. People don’t realize how much work it takes to do this.
If I was to launch a journal, or a Pierre coury or epoch times, was to launch a journal like this, it’s a major, major endeavor where you’re constantly communicating back and forth, tracking all these things, tracking them through time. To the credit of frontiers, they have found a way to partially automate this. This is one of their core competencies. But it’s insanely time consuming to do this. Well, to do it superficially, where you’re just kind of rolling them through doesn’t do anybody any good.
I agree that there’s a need, but who’s going to capitalize? Well, let’s consider this a call, you know, to that. I think if there was, there was a donor consortium that really cared about science. I think you’re right. This is something that really merits a philanthropic effort. The fact that the vast majority of this peer reviewed literature turns out to be irreproducible, you know, whether or not it was fraudulent or inadvertent, we think that this label, peer reviewed research, is the gold standard.
That means that this must really be true. But in fact, manuscripts that have been through peer review cannot be reproduced by third parties. Maybe John Ioannidis, who’s kind of, I guess, the expert on this type of question, might be involved in the creation of such a journal. I don’t know if that’s something. That’s a great idea. So I think that’s a wrap for today’s truth bomb, and let’s jump to a new segment that I’m really excited about, which we call Cywar glossary.
So I want to do a little hat tip to a certain doctor Jill Malone, who has put together this amazing glossary of psi war terms that we’re going to be benefiting liberally from in this segment. I think language is super important. It controls and structures how we think, and having a range of terms to help us to think about psychological warfare and cognitive warfare is super important. And it’s something that Jill realized when she was working on this current book that she and I are writing.
But she’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting called psiwar sovereignty and rogue state or rogue government. And so as she was building it, she realized we needed to have a glossary because so many of these terms are unusual, and it’s a kind of a brave new world that we’re functioning in, you know? So in this case, you know, I’m I kind of like sea lions. I just wanted to say that for the record.
Okay. And except. Except not these kinds of sea lions. Right. So let’s talk about sea lioning. Yeah, that’s a weird term we ran into about a month ago. I had never heard of it before, and I don’t think you heard about it either. This idea that there’s a strategy in which people intentionally troll. Most of our audience understands what trollery is about. They provoke people online through this technique of patient questioning, and it’s something that is most often done with people that have a scientific or technical background.
They’re trying to provoke scientists and technical experts by repeatedly asking basic questions that probably, in many cases, a person has already gone over 100 times. Like, for instance, one of the ones I get is, why did you invent rna vaccines? I get that so many times, and I’m finally to the point where I just say, watch the video. But that’s what it’s intended to do. Sea lining is to trigger people to get frustrated by this process of patient questioning.
Holocaust denialism is really sea lining. This process of asking again and again, well, what is the actual proof that the Holocaust happened? Or another one is, what is the actual proof that there was a SARS virus or there was any virus at all? No. Show me the proof that there actually is a virus, that this isn’t just something that was created for PR purposes. I think we’re going to get a lot of flack for that last one, Robert.
Probably. But that is a sea lining technique. This patient repeated questioning of things that are known and documented. And it can be enormously frustrating when you’re encountering it well. And this is the real difficulty, is when we’re in this information warfare, psi war space, or era, for lack of a better term. I think, as you’ve described it, there are a lot of things that we’ve taken for granted as assumptions.
I mean, certainly for me, that turned out to not be true. Right. So it’s kind of a rife area for abuse right now. Yeah. Right. Yep, exactly. So almost everything is subject to question. So, yeah, I’ve found. So I talk about the 77th Brigade from time to time. That’s a actual division of the British army, the 77th Brigade. It’s an informal division of people that are basically, you know, the.
The stereotypic young man sitting in his basement. They’re actually paid by the british government to write stuff online. So we hear about russian bots and trolls, but the British army has their own troll army that they call the 77th Brigade. And in my experience, when I travel to the UK and speak, these people come out of the woodwork. And sea lioning is one of their favorite methods, where they will ask these seemingly innocuous questions as if they are just untutored, asking in good faith.
And that’s the key thing about it, is the position that I truly don’t understand this fundamental principle. And can you please explain it to me? And then you explain it and they say, yeah, but what about this? It’s kind of like you don’t have kids, but any of us who have understand the two or three year old, that uses the trick of asking why? And you can explain whatever the topic is, and then they’ll say, but why? And just you can go on for hours.
And that is essentially sea lioning. Question is, how did this term come up, this term of sea lioning? It’s pretty weird. It turns out it was a cartoon a number of years ago. Let’s see, it was Malke. David Malkey in 2014 wrote a little cartoon about somebody makes a statement that they don’t really like sea lions, and then suddenly a sea lion pops up in the cartoon and asks them, well, why don’t you like sea lions? And they give an answer.
And then the sea lion continues to pursue them all the way to their bedroom, asking, well, why don’t you tell me why you really don’t like sea lions? Asking persistently to the point where it’s insanely aggravating. And that’s what gave rise to this Internet term, another viral term, sea lining, for this trolling method of persistent, aggressive patient question. And I think this is actually incredibly important because the moment that you know that a technique exists, you can actually.
This is just like logical fallacies. The moment that you know that it’s out there, that it can be used, that it’s a technique, you start seeing it and you understand that you’re being played. Yep. Yeah. And it’s another one of those truisms. The only defense you have is to just block the person, which is usually where this ends up, once you realize that they’re not truly asking a question in good faith, but they’re trying to manipulate you psychologically.
You can get angry at them, but that gives them exactly what they want because it delegitimizes you, the scientist, or whatever the ex, you know, whatever your area of expertise is, it shows you to be an angry person. And they’re just playing the position of an honest, truthful seeker of information. And how can you possibly get angry at me for doing that? Yeah. And that’s the goal. It’s kind of two options, right? One is to piss you off publicly and then sort of show you to be a kind of bad actor or overly emotional or just to waste your time.
Which is the other side. Yep. You know, and of course, the trick is figuring out, because there are well intentioned people, and I’ve certainly started, you know, discussions that way. When I look at someone, I usually check their profile, like, okay, this person looks like they might actually be asking a genuine question, even though it seems a little bit like they should know. And then try for one.
And I’ll say that I think it seems to be like you’re starting in good faith here. So I’m going to answer, and then if things go south from there, then I just kind of disengage. Yes. So, like you said, I think this is a great term to understand and to be alert for so you don’t get caught in the trap of being sea lion and forced into a position where you get frustrated and angry and then kind of lash out and delegitimize yourself.
So that was a lot of fun. And we’re going to be exposing all sorts of other techniques and terms as part of our cywar glossary and coming episode. And we’ll see you next week on fallout. .
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