Clifford Goldstein’s latest “Cliff’s Edge” column at the Review, entitled Retraction Watch, is excellent. Cliff points out that peer-review is not the cure-all that it is often made out to be. Every year, thousands of peer reviewed articles must be withdrawn or retracted:
The headlines read as follows: “Engineering publisher pulled 57 papers in a day for peer review ‘irregularities.’” Or: “Another Springer Nature journal has retracted over 300 papers since July.” (The article appeared that November, which means an average of 50 papers a month retracted.)
It is not just papers in obscure journals no one’s ever heard of, or studies that came and went making no impact. Cliff notes [which would be another punny name for Goldstein’s column] that one of the most highly respected scientific journals in the world, Nature, was forced to retract a 20 year old article that had been cited over 4,500 times!:
And this: “Nature retracts highly cited 2002 paper that claimed adult stem cells could become any type of cell.”[vi] (This paper, before retraction, had been cited 4,500 times.)
A single bad actor can do a great deal of damage to the scientific literature. Consider this case:
Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion.” (The article showed “breathtaking” image manipulation by a man deemed “among the world’s top 10 scientists in certain subfields,” and whose questioned papers have been cited 18,000 times, “often by leading scholars,” and in some cases the questioned data directly impacted research about a Parkinson’s Disease drug worth hundreds of millions of dollars.)
All the examples that Cliff cites are from the web site, “Retraction Watch,” a site devoted to tracking and highlighting scientific, technical, or medical papers that have been withdrawn or retracted. The site’s database now includes some 45,000 retracted articles. In recent years there have been over 5,000 retracted papers per year, but the webmasters, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, believe that far more fraudulent and shoddy studies need to be de-published.
The truth, however,” they write, “is that the number of retractions in 2022—5,500—is almost definitely a vast undercount of how much misconduct and fraud exists. We estimate that at least 100,000 retractions should occur every year; some scientists and science journalists think the number should be even higher. (To be sure, not every retraction is the result of misconduct; about one in five involve cases of honest error.)”
So 100,000 published studies per year should be retracted, and in 80% of those cases, the problem is intentional misconduct, not innocent error! We’re often told by science worshipers that the fraudulent studies are quickly weeded out, but this is clearly not true. According to Marcus and Oransky, about 95% of the bad studies are never weeded out of the scientific literature.
A big part of the problem is drug company corruption, and I am happy to tell you that Cliff is skeptical about the good intentions of what I have taken to calling the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex:
Or this: “An Alzheimer’s drugmaker is accused of data manipulation. Should its trials be stopped?” (Certainty the article couldn’t mean that Big Pharma would be anything but honest and scrupulous, following only the strictest protocols of scientific procedures and ethics in its drug research would it, especially when human lives were at stake? Of course not, even if the company “announced it will pay $40 million to resolve the SEC investigation into whether it misled investors with doctored data.”)
Cliff confides that, “A Loma Linda medical doctor friend once told me, “You want to know the outcomes of a scientific study, just find out who’s paying for it.” Drug companies generate $1.6 trillion, with a “t”, in revenue every year, and billions of that money goes to pay for studies that end up as published papers. But the drug companies hurt more people than they help:
Here’s what the NIH National Library of Medicine (National Center for Bio-technology Information) posted in 2013 under the headline: “Institutional corruption of pharmaceuticals and the myth of safe and effective drugs.” The opening lines read: “Over the past 35 years, patients have suffered from a largely hidden epidemic of side effects from drugs that usually have few offsetting benefits. The pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the practice of medicine through its influence over what drugs are developed, how they are tested, and how medical knowledge is created. Since 1906, heavy commercial influence has compromised congressional legislation to protect the public from unsafe drugs.”
Please go to the Review and read all of Cliff’s excellent article.
I sure wish this were just an opportunity to ponder the human condition, and the fact that all human enterprises, including the well thought of ones, such as science, are tinged with sin and subject to failure. But unfortunately the Seventh-day Adventist Church has chosen to bind itself too tightly to the scientific enterprise. We have an official statement, issued in 2015, which states that:
The Adventist health emphasis is based on biblical revelation, the inspired writing of E.G. White (co-founder of the Church), and on peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Why would anyone ever want to claim “peer-reviewed scientific literature” as authoritative within Adventism? The answer is found if we continue with the statement:
The Adventist Health Emphasis is based on biblical revelation, the inspired writing of E.G. White (co-founder of the Church), and on peer-reviewed scientific literature. As such, we encourage responsible immunization/vaccination, and have no religious or faith-based reason not to encourage our adherents to responsibly participate in protective and preventive immunization programs.
There is nothing in the Bible nor in the inspired writings of Ellen White that discusses or encourages immunization or vaccination, so the authors of this 2015 statement on vaccination were forced to appeal to “peer-reviewed scientific literature.”
The fact that they had to reach outside of real Adventist sources of authority—the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy—should have alerted them that the statement they were about to issue should not be issued by our Church. Instead of appealing to the authority of a non-inspired, sinful human enterprise that is riddled with fraud and corruption, why not just be silent on vaccination?
What is so important about vaccination that the SDA Church must make a statement in support of it, a statement that potentially restricts the freedom of Adventists who do not want themselves or their children to be vaccinated?
This question took on great urgency during the Covid pandemic, when government, big business, education, and indeed most other institutions tried to force everyone within their power to be vaccinated with an untested experimental gene therapy that, it quickly became apparent, had unusually high risks and minimal benefit.
We would likely be well on our way to forgetting the church’s appalling behavior during Covid—it was, after all, society-wide, not unique to the SDA Church—if the Church would allow diversity of opinion about the episode, but sadly it will not. The meaning of the Micheff scandal is that the church will tolerate only one official narrative about Covid and the vaccines. If you criticize the church’s failures during Covid, they will come after you with the tire iron, and that is just what they’ve done (metaphorically) to Conrad Vine. If your pastor defends you from them, they will fire your pastor, and that is (literally) what they’ve done to Ron Kelly.
It is past time to stop trying to defend “peer reviewed scientific literature” as a source of authority in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Let us separate our Church from the sinful, fallible, corrupt enterprise of “science,” or as Paul called it, “science falsely so called.”
“O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it some have missed the mark as regards the faith.” 1 Tim. 6:19-21