IN THE words of muckraker Upton Sinclair, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ So may be said about the so-called ‘scientific community’ in their research enterprise on Covid-19. It is particularly so for anything relating to the novel mRNA vaccines, touted as safe and effective but transpiring to be neither.
We wrote recently in the Daily Sceptic about how the method which is central to the scientific publication process, far from being used to assure quality, is being used to maintain prevailing narrative. Peer review has prevented proper debate on Covid-19 by suppressing contrary evidence.
Study reports which downplay the seriousness of Covid-19 or do not sufficiently catastrophise it, or which question vaccine safety and efficacy, are less likely to be published. In fact, there is evidence that potentially important research findings are being denied publication by puritanical or timid editors and peer reviewers. Censorship has extended to pre-print platforms. Numerous articles which initially appeared on pre-print sites such as MedRxiv and Rxiv have been withdrawn.
Meanwhile, not only is there no such hindrance for articles which adhere to the Covid-19 narrative, but quality control sometimes seems to be sidestepped by ideological rectitude. The editor of TCW alerted us to a pre-print article ‘Does seizure risk increase after Covid?’ which appears biased to the point of scientific deceit.
The paper was published on the medical education website Medscape, which claims to be the ‘leading online global destination for physicians and healthcare professionals worldwide, offering the latest medical news and expert perspectives’. Further, it is ‘committed to providing Medscape users with editorial content that meets the highest journalistic and editorial standards, focusing on fairness, accuracy, independence, transparency, and objectivity’.
The researchers’ unsurprising answer on whether Covid-19 causes seizures is that indeed it does, and that on this particular adversity, the novel coronavirus is worse than influenza. This is very tuneful to ears that hear only Covid-19; anything else drowned out by ‘la-la-la’.
The data are taken from a similarly titled peer-reviewed article ‘Incidence of epilepsy and seizures over the first 6 months after a Covid-19 diagnosis: a retrospective cohort study’ published in Neurology. The original article presents the usual hyperbole, its introduction stating that ‘Covid-19 infection is associated with acute neurological manifestations, particularly encephalopathy, agitation, confusion, anosmia, aguesia and stroke’ before speculating that ‘Covid-19 may impair neurological function through effects on brain endothelial cells, inflammation, cytokine storm, and other mechanisms’.
Like any nasty respiratory infection, the disease known as Covid-19 may lead to complications in any bodily system. However, we are also aware of something else that the researchers could have taken into account. According to peer-reviewed journals Frontiers in Neurology and the BMJ, respectively, Covid-19 vaccines have been recorded as leading to stroke and cytokine storm. Thus, with this knowledge, we expected to see this at least being considered, at least as a confounding factor.
However, vaccines are mentioned neither in the Neurology article nor in the Medscape report. We argue that there is no excuse for this given that the records for the data analysis included people diagnosed with Covid-19 from the outbreak in early 2020 to May 31, 2021 and who were still alive on August 24, 2021. The data were obtained from 81million people via the TriNetX Analytics, which included the UK and the US. The vaccines were approved for general use in December 2020 and the rollout in the UK began on December 2 2020 with the US beginning on January 4, 2021. It is inexcusable that the vaccination status of the people involved was not included, or even mentioned as a limitation.
We considered a rejoinder to Medscape, but there was no facility to comment on the article. Digging further into the ‘About’ pages of Medscape we saw a FAQ which asked: ‘Why don’t I see an option to comment on some articles?’ to which the answer is: ‘Medscape may choose to exclude certain articles from the Medscape commenting platform due to a variety of factors, including the articles’ posting date, source and/or topic’.
Those of us who keep an eye on these matters, including many readers of TCW, have become almost inured to the medical malfeasance of Covid-19 and the interventions purportedly to manage it. However, deliberately to turn a blind eye to a potential and established causative factor in a medical treatment received by the majority of the population is troubling if not scandalous.
As Upton Sinclair might have said, the elephant is in full view, but it pays to blame the mice for the large droppings.