I've been letting my Facebook friends know about this amazing, excellent scientific journal article:
Kostoff et al., "Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?" In reply, a friend-of-a-friend posted a link to this rebuttal written by
Samuel Klein of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, where Klein is "
currently developing the Underlay Project for federating global public knowledge".
If I told you that Harvard has a plan for "
federating global public knowledge", you'd say I'm some sort of conspiracy theorist. But there it is. And, Klein's reply to Kostoff et al. is rather alarmingly revealing about what "Federated Global Public Knowledge" is going to look like. Klein's post is so egregious, that I've decided to offer a line-by-line breakdown.
The title is a pun on a website entitled "
The Cost of Knowledge", which protests Elsevier's business practices. The complaint is that Elsevier publishes a lot of journals, and offers them for sale as a "package deal" to libraries which might not subscribe to all of them otherwise. Thus, the accusation seems to be that Elsevier is making too much money. And furthermore, Elsevier supported SOPA and PIPA, which seems to be a rather out-of-date complaint since those bills failed in ~2012.
Academic publishing does seem to be something of a racket, as explained by Martin Hagve in this article: "
The money behind academic publishing." The costs of research and writing are paid by research funds (public and corporate sources, or occasionally student tuition); editors and peer reviewers receive symbolic pay at best; and access is now mostly digital, so even printing costs are disappearing. As a result, traditional academic publishing is enormously profitable: Elsevier has net margins of 40% on revenues of $9.8 Billion (2019). As the single largest publisher, Hagve says they have 16% of the total market.
Hagve goes on to complain that these publishing houses sell their journals based on a quality measure, "Impact Factor", which is calculated according to the number of citations of the journal's articles. And this is the basis of Klein's accusation of "Click Bait": apparently Kostoff's article is too damn popular, and is being quoted all over the Internet and will (predictably) be discussed in other academic journal articles, much to Klein's chagrin.
As Klein is presumably aware, there's another competitive model for academic publishing now. In this model, rather than asking for libraries to pay for paper copies, or asking readers to pay by the article or for subscriptions, the authors themselves are asked to pay for the publisher's costs. Traditionalists complain that this model largely removes the publisher's incentive for quality control, or any need to appeal to the knowledge consumers' demand for a quality product. In extreme cases, this leads to "predatory publishing" (charging exorbitant prices to naive academics desperate for publication) or even "journal hijacking" (publishing a new journal under the same name as an existing successful journal).
Regardless of the complaints, the new "open access" publishing model is clearly meeting a market demand, and holding traditional academic publisher profits in check to some extent. It's possible that much of the outrage against "predatory publishing" is, in fact, turf protection by the traditionalists.
Earlier this month, Elsevier‘s Toxicology Reports (CiteScore 6.2, top quartile) published a special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic. Its includes a remarkable article by Kostoff, et al., claiming that getting a COVID-19 vaccine is, “extremely conservatively“, 5x as likely to kill people over 65 as it is to save them, and even more harmful to younger people. (Kostoff, et al., Tox. Rep. (2020), 7, 1448-1458)
So far so good. Klein correctly observes that
Toxicology Reports has an Impact Factor in the top quartile, a respectable performance. And, the article does indeed make the claim that the vaccines are doing more harm than good, by a factor of at least five.
This echoes the fraudulent claims of German homeopath Harald Walach, who briefly published a similar article in MDPI Vaccines in June, before it was promptly retracted.
Klein does not mention that the article was subsequently re-published after a new peer review process, in the journal
Science, Public Health Policy & the Law, a new journal published by an academic entity known as IPAK, and edited by James Lyons-Weiler. This is another type of scientific publishing: Lyons-Weiler set up a 501(c)3 educational institution, assembled a qualified board of advisors, and got himself appointed as the editor of the institute's journal. He then recruited other scientists to serve as article editors and peer reviewers. In other words, he does business in more or less the same way as any other scientific journal, aside from the scale of the operation. As far as I can tell, the costs of publication are not foisted on either the libraries or the authors, but are funded by donations to the institute.
In an editorial at the journal, Lyons-Weiler explains his view that the Walach et al. paper was retracted because the editors of the journal caved in to collective pressure from editorial board members, who resigned in protest because they disagreed with Walach's evidence and arguments.
It is sad to bear witness to the fact that science has degenerated into a war against unwanted and inconvenient results, conclusions and interpretations via the process of post-publication retraction for issues other than fraud, grave error in execution, and plagiarism. The weaponization of the process of retraction of scientific studies is well underway, and it induces a bias that could be called “retraction bias”, or, in the case in which a few persons haunt journals in search of studies that cast doubt on their commercial products, a “ghouling bias”, which leads to biased systematic reviews and warped meta-analyses.
[....]
Post-publication retraction for mere differences of opinion expressed as interpretation is a form of weak double jeopardy with strong (negative) consequences to knowledge: when journals retract studies that have been conducted and have survived peer review due to prescribed conclusions, knowledge suffers. [...] Viewed on the basis of a reader’s difference of interpretation, journals that retract to maintain a prescribed narrative are participating in the etiological equivalent of book- burning.
Continuing with the analysis of the Klein blog...
A few of the most outrageous claims are listed below. None of this is subtle – unbelievable assertions start in the second paragraph of the abstract; the lead author has no past experience in the field; and the article puts “pandemic” and “vaccine” in scare quotes, and makes regular use of bold italics to emphasize points that are exaggerated.
Indeed, statements that disagree with the consensus narrative, start in the 2nd paragraph. But that doesn't make the points "unbelievable", nor does it make them "assertions". Yes, the article does use scare quotes for “pandemic” and “vaccine”, and it explains its rationale for doing so. As to the
bold italics, that seems to be a significant exaggeration, as well as a lousy reason for indignation. The article very rarely uses bold italics, and mostly for clarification.
This is why we have peer review, and editors, to distinguish research from polemic.
Here we come to Klein's view of the purpose of peer review. That is, according to Klein, there is one Consensus Truth, which is in continuous battle with Disinformation and Falsehood. Editors and peer review, according to Klein, should exist to enforce Truth and suppress Polemic.
Access to a reliable + competent body of reviewers is, in theory, a primary service that giant publishers like Elsevier offer to editors. Another is their name: being an Elsevier journal means you will be taken seriously out of the gate, and added to the major indices.
As if most academics don't personally know any other academics who are qualified to read and give opinions!
Yes, Elsevier is a prestigious publisher, and often features articles that have the Consensus Stamp of Approval, including Big Pharma. In fact, when an article like this appears in an Elsevier journal, I sit up and take notice in the same way that a courtroom goes hush when the alleged criminal 'fesses up to the crime. Coming from Elsevier, Kostoff et al. is an admission against the interest of powerful forces that dominate many of its journals.
We should all be concerned that our publishing model allowed such a deceptive essay to be given the veneer of legitimacy – for weeks now, without correction.
Oh my gosh, the journal and publisher have resisted outside pressure for literally weeks! Another ten days now, and counting, since Klein's blog came out!! Surely the axe must come down sooner or later. But if the article eventually does get retracted, that will have absolutely zero effect on my opinion about the paper itself.
Skipping ahead now in the article... I don't intend to miss any salient points, but Klein (like any author) is somewhat repetitive.
Article-level fraud (by the authors)
1. Extensive misuse of VAERS data: VAERS is an open public registry of unvetted self-reports of health events occurring after vaccination. Most events are not caused by vaccines, but this is a starting point for further analysis. Doctors are supposed to report any deaths or hospitalizations occurring within a week of vaccination, regardless of potential causal link.
The very openness of this data has led to it being widely cited in anti-vax propaganda, misinterpreting VAERS as a catalog of known harms and side-effects. (“Don’t Fall for VAERS scares“)
1a: The article mentions that VAERS data is not causal; but then after a brief hand-waving assumes it is causal in all calculations. (inflating their result by a factor of ~1000)
"Fraud!!" (And in large bold type to emphasize points that are exaggerated!!) Fraud is a crime as well as a civil tort. Furthermore, in many states it is considered to be moral turpitude, which means that false accusations of fraud are Defamation Per Se. The elements of fraud include a knowing intent to deceive a victim, justifiable reliance by the victim, and damage to the victim.
So the first example of "fraud" cited here, is "misuse of VAERS data". But, Klein's description is highly misleading. He says it's a registry of "
unvetted self-reports", but then immediately contradicts himself by saying that "
Doctors are supposed to report any deaths or hospitalizations." Actually the system is open to self-reports as well as reports from any medical professional. But in reality it's difficult and burdensome to use, and many professionals are actively discouraged from reporting anything, so under-reporting is legion.
The raison d'etre for VAERS is as an early warning system. If a lot of adverse events are coming in, doctors should be investigating. What's happening is that an extraordinarily powerful alarm is being raised, but only the so-called "anti-vax propaganda" sources are paying any attention.
The Kostoff article is a notable peer-reviewed attempt to draw attention to the VAERS data. Far from simply "hand-waving", Kostoff et al. fully acknowledge that challenge of attributing causality, and they show a variety of reasons that the vaccines are indeed the CAUSE of the horrendous rate of adverse events being filed into VAERS on a daily basis. What can you say about describing Kostoff et al's paper as "brief hand-waving"? I call it FRAUD. That is, Klein KNOWS it isn't true, because he's read the paper. He's hoping that his readers won't. His readers know that Klein's views are consistent with the "consensus" and so they're unlikely to question, so their reliance on Klein is justifiable. And if they get the vaxx as a result, and it's as dangerous as Kostoff et al say, they will be harmed.
The true facts matter. If the vaccines are safe, then Klein's criticism of Kostoff is still blatantly false, and his characterization of VAERS is misleading. But if someone takes the vaccine as a result of Klein's distortions, there's no harm done, and so there's no fraud.
But conversely, if the vaccines are dangerous, then Klein is the one who is defrauding his readers, as well as committing willful defamation against Kostoff, his co-authors, peer reviewers, and Elsevier the publisher.
And I put that in bold type. So sue me.
Klein says that Kostoff et al. are overestimating vaccine fatalities by a factor of 1000, because of this one issue. Where does that number come from? Klein seems to have made it up. He seems to be assuming that out of 1000 post-vaccine fatalities, only one was caused by the vaccines, and the other 999 were purely random unrelated events. Where is the research to back up that assertion? Where are the autopsies, the lab tests, the pathology reports? The problem here is, the system can't see what it won't look for. And these studies can't get done, because of the presumption that the vaccines are safe.
- 1b: A 2010 working paper suggested that 1% of all adverse events, and perhaps 3-40% of serious adverse events, temporally following a vaccination, are reported to VAERS. The article cites this to suggest that 1% of deaths are reported, although detailed studies show that most potentially-causal deaths are reported. (adding a factor of 100)
References, please? The working paper I'm aware of,
Lazarus et al, said that 1% of adverse events are reported, and didn't offer any further data about serious AE's. The authors stated that the CDC stopped returning phone calls, preventing them from carrying out "system performance assessments." Where are these "detailed studies" showing that most"potentially-causal" deaths are reported? What could be the basis for assessing "potential causation"? Until proven otherwise, I submit that Klein is lying about this: if these studies existed, Kostoff et al. would have known about them, and discussed them.
