What to do about woke science journals

By W.A. Eliot

Let me define the “woke” in the title very broadly as promoting any of…

a) a favored narrative or questionable treatment (e.g., publishing only articles supporting a huge climate change impact or government COVID-19 policies while rejecting high-quality articles with solid evidence to the contrary);

b) CRT and DEI (e.g., employment processes and medical treatment; justifying BLM rallies during a mandatory and supposedly necessary COVID lockdown);

c) the trans agenda (e.g., suppression of literature on psychological diagnoses or social media influence; transition surgery for minors; birth certificate with the desired gender of the baby or its parents; males in female sports);

d) TDS (e.g., numerous get-Trump Lancet editorials having nothing to do with medicine; the Lancet by-passing its usual peer–review process to rush a negative study on hydroxychloroquine to print after Trump said HCQ might work, only to have to retract it ten days later after the data were proven bogus);

e) rescinding already published or posted articles after pressure from advocacy groups.

There can be overlap between categories.

When I first started working on this piece, my plan was to recommend constructing a list of woke science journals and their infractions, similar to lists of woke companies, with the idea of embarrassing them into changing their evil ways. But when I was gathering examples, it dawned on me that just about all science journals would be on the list (with a few notable exceptions, such as the British Medical Journal). So here are some possible alternative approaches:

List the top worst offenders.
List the top most prominent offenders.
List the few journals that aren’t guilty of these offenses as the only ones to be trusted.
Conservative media collectively disparage any previously guilty journal whenever it publishes a result on a controversial subject getting favorable MSM coverage by highlighting its past offenses, claiming the public no longer trusts its articles.

Whichever approach, or combination of them, an offending journal remains in disfavored status, at least until it comes clean on its past practices, which includes admitting to the past specific offenses, apologizing for them and the harm done, and telling us what measures have been taken to assure us this will never happen again. (Pressure or threats from the government is not a valid excuse.) I realize some journals will be reluctant to change—whether due to monetary incentives or vocal advocacy groups they just won’t take on—but perhaps coming changes in how the U.S. funds research (in particular, NIAID no longer having sole control) will have an impact. I hope appropriate and capable parties take up this “list” challenge and it leads to restoring our faith in science journals.

In case you think this is all stale, think of the damage done by the over 300 COVID-era medical papers now retracted due to scientific errors or ethics concerns. Or the preprint written by prominent authors on deaths caused by COVID vaccines which was taken down within 24 hours from the Lancet web site in July 2023 due to pressure (apparently from the vaccine companies) which has now, after peer review, just been accepted for publication in another journal. Or the now exposed Nature Medicine article on “Proximal Origins” written at Anthony Fauci’s behest claiming the lab-leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory”; there actually are a group of scientists currently demanding its retraction.

There are some infractions I personally just can’t forgive no matter what. Recall the VA study which administered hydroxychloroquine only to COVID patients near death, or the Brazil study which intentionally overdosed COVID patients on chloroquine, each to “prove” chloroquine-based drugs don’t reduce COVID deaths. I call that murder, and everyone who participated in or sanctioned these studies knowing full well what they were doing should be disbarred and criminal charges levied against them. I could say the same about the approval process, use, and journal coverage of remdesivir for COVID inpatients, but this has already been covered extensively by many, so enough said.

W.A. Eliot is a pseudonym.