SSRN and medRxiv Censor Counter-Narrative Science
Huge blockages to getting skeptical science about Covid published
Jay Bhattacharya1 and Steve H. Hanke
Chapter XI of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is titled “The End of Truth.” Hayek develops the idea that to function and maintain power, totalitarian regimes must use propaganda to establish an official doctrine:
The need for such official doctrines as an instrument of directing and rallying the efforts of the people has been clearly foreseen by the various theoreticians of the totalitarian system. Plato’s “noble lies” and Sorel’s “myths” serve the same purpose as the racial doctrine of the Nazis or the theory of the cooperative state of Mussolini. They are all necessarily based on particular views about facts which are then elaborated into scientific theories in order to justify a preconceived opinion. (Hayek 1965, 157)
To be effective, propaganda must exhibit monopoly power, with no dissent allowed and “all information that might cause doubt or hesitation…withheld” (Hayek 1965, 160). Hayek grew up in Vienna and lived there until 1931. He had first-hand experience with totalitarianism and studied its operations. He dedicated much of his professional life to understanding the causes of bad government and combatting its brutalities.
So, we may ask: has covid brought an end to truth? We answer by accounting our covid research experiences, as well as those of others. Before doing so, we reflect on how matters of public health, such as covid, fit into Hayek’s “The End of Truth.”
There is perhaps nothing that opens the door to censorship wider than the fear of disease and the prospect of an early death. Indeed, there is nothing that matches a looming pandemic to generate fear. And there is nothing like fear to grease the skids of censorship.
In the present article, we use the word censorship in the sense of the first definition of the transitive verb censor given at Wiktionary (link): “To review for, and if necessary to remove or suppress, content from books, films, correspondence, and other media which is regarded as objectionable (for example, obscene, likely to incite violence, or sensitive).”
This definition does not confine censorship to activity undertaken by governmental players. We believe that a line that is connoted by censorship, a line that distinguishes censorship from plain and honest content curation, has been crossed by SSRN and medRxiv. That line has to do with violating terms and conditions, even if those are only tacitly understood and are derived from established convention, and with the violations deriving from motives like those that drive government censorship. Indeed, we would not rule out the possibility governmental pressures are playing a role in the censorship perpetrated by SSRN and medRxiv.
So, how does covid fit into this picture? A signal event in the timeline of Western covid lockdowns occurred on March 16, 2020, with the publication of the Imperial College London covid report (Ferguson et al. 2020). Its frightening predictions sent shock waves around the world. The next day, the government threw the United Kingdom into lockdown.
The impact of the report was amplified by the United Kingdom’s soft-power machine, the BBC. Its reach has no equal: broadcasting in 42 languages, reaching 468 million people worldwide each week, and efficiently disseminating its message (Barber 2022). With the BBC in full cry and the public genuinely alarmed, there was little room or tolerance for dissent. In the United Kingdom, the government put its recently established Counter Disinformation Unit on full covid alert, to stamp out dissent (Investigations Team 2023).
A copycat cascade then took hold, with the United States and other countries embracing the UK government’s messaging and policies. The result was a policy based on a defective model (see Herby et al. 2023a, 28–29) that originated at Imperial College London under the leadership of Professor Neil Ferguson, who is the director of Imperial College’s School of Public Health.
UK policymakers should have been aware that Professor Ferguson’s Imperial College team had a history of defective modeling and a track record littered with what are little more than fantasy numbers. To put the blunders of the Imperial College London’s epidemiological fear machine into context, consider the numbers generated by the modelers in 2005, when Professor Ferguson suggested that “up to around 200 million” could die from bird flu globally. He justified this claim by comparing the lethality of bird flu to that of the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, which killed 40 million (Sturcke 2005). By 2021, bird flu had only killed 456 people worldwide (WHO 2021). And, there were other huge misses by the Imperial College London’s modelers: foot and mouth in 2001, mad cow in 2002, and swine flu in 2009 (Hanke and Dowd 2022).
SSRN censors Herby, Jonung, and Hanke
The Social Science Research Network (SSRN), operated by Netherlandsbased publishing house Elsevier, is an enormous platform in academia. SSRN is extremely important to professors for disseminating their research results and for advancing within the academic community. Indeed, as of September 25, 2023, the SSRN provided 1,271,271 research papers from 1,381,280 researchers in 70 disciplines, per its homepage (link). SSRN is the leading site for academic working papers. It platforms research irrespective of whether the research has been submitted, accepted, or published in journals. Such platforming of research is vital for giving space to all voices, to make scholarship contestable and challengeable, and without delay or stonewalling.
The gatekeeping role of the journals is also a vital facet of the common enterprise of scholarship—but it is separate from the realm of the working paper, and it should continue to be kept separate. If SSRN wishes to play the role of scholarly gatekeeper, it is obliged to assume that role responsibly, which includes clarifying its gatekeeping procedures and living up to the procedures it purports to follow, avoiding double-standards.
Here is what SSRN says (as of September 25, 2023) about its policies regarding “Contributed Content” (link):
Contributed content should be relevant to the subject scope of SSRN. Content may not be illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, infringing of intellectual property rights, invasive of privacy or otherwise injurious or objectionable. Elsevier does not pre-screen or regularly review any contributed content, but Elsevier has the right (though not the obligation) to monitor submissions to determine compliance with these Terms and any operating rules to satisfy any law, regulation, or authorized government request.
Needless to say, none of the SSRN-censored research products mentioned in the present article runs afoul of the guidelines against material that is “illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, infringing of intellectual property rights,” or “invasive of privacy.” As for “otherwise injurious or objectionable,” if that is the grounds for SSRN’s censorship, it is something they should declare and defend. Thus far, SSRN has failed to do so.
More here:
https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1276/BhattacharyaHankeSept2023.pdf
************************************************Hydroxychloroquine Reduces COVID-19 Mortality, Study Finds
People who took hydroxychloroquine in combination with another drug while hospitalized with COVID-19 were less likely to die than those who didn't, according to a new study.
Hydroxychloroquine, which is widely used against malaria and arthritis, was given to hundreds of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Belgium. Thousands of others didn't receive the drug.
Researchers examined records from 352 adults hospitalized in AZ Groeninge Hospital in Kortrijk, Belgium. All patients tested positive for COVID-19 or had results from CT scans that suggested COVID-19 was present. Patients received hydroxychloroquine alone or with azithromycin, an antibiotic. They were scanned before and after treatment.
Researchers compared the results of the record analysis with a control group of 3,533 people hospitalized across Belgium with COVID-19 from March 14, 2020, to May 24, 2020. The people didn't receive hydroxychloroquine but did receive standard of care.
Twenty-eight days following the diagnosis of COVID-19, 59 people treated with hydroxychloroquine had died. The mortality percentage, or 16.7 percent, was lower than the 25.9 percentage in the control group.
Researchers found patients who received hydroxychloroquine were more likely to survive even after adjusting for age and other factors.
"Our study suggests that, despite the controversy surrounding its use, treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin remains a viable option," Dr. Gert Meeus, a nephrologist with AZ Groeninge Hospital, and other researchers wrote.
The study was published by the journal New Microbes and New Infections. Limitations include the retrospective nature of the study and differences between the treatment and control groups, including the former being younger on average. Authors declared no conflicts of interest or funding.
The research adds to a mixed dataset on hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19.
Some other studies have found that hydroxychloroquine recipients were less likely to die, including a study that analyzed records from a health system in Michigan. Many of the positive findings concerned hydroxychloroquine in combination with azithromycin.
Others have found little or no evidence that hydroxychloroquine affects COVID-19, including a U.S.-government funded study across 34 hospitals.
Multiple studies on hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19 have been retracted.
Hydroxychloroquine is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration but the agency has warned since mid-2020 against using it for COVID-19. Belgian regulators rescinded authorization for hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 in June 2020.
Dosage Issue?
Hydroxychloroquine proponents say that the amount of the drug, and when it's given, is key to properly studying how it affects COVID-19.
Dr. Meeus and the other Belgian researchers acknowledged clinical trials that did not find a benefit for hydroxychloroquine, as well as some observational studies. Other observational papers have suggested hydroxychloroquine is effective.
"A potential explanation for the discrepancy between the results in the observational trials and the large randomized trials may be the use of a different dose of hydroxychloroquine," they said.
The researchers started with 400 milligrams, two times a day, on day one. That was followed by 200 milligrams a day for five days, in line with national guidelines.
In the clinical trials that found no benefit, patients received four times as much hydroxychloroquine.
"Our treatment was lower and also used the antibiotic azithromycin. This double treatment is a possible explanation for why we found positive effects, but other studies did not," Dr. Meeus told Doorbraak.
Peter Horby, a spokesman for one of the trials, told The Epoch Times previously that the dosage amounts were "carefully selected" and "designed to achieve the concentrations needed to inhibit the virus as quickly and safely as possible."
Dr. Meeus told Doorbraak that further research needs to be done on the drug, or HCQ, but that it very well could be beneficial.
"HCQ is not a panacea, and of course, further research needs to be done. After all, you can't just conclude from an observational study like ours whether something works or not," he said. "But look, we have followed the protocol as it was originally prescribed in Belgium. A study ... also showed in early 2020 that HCQ did lead to lower mortality. If the results of our study confirm this again, we think it is very plausible that the drug has helped quite a few patients."
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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