A Garbage System, Not a Patch
A trashy description leads off a bumbling trip guided by the Retraction Watch guys
Last week, the Atlantic published an article by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus of Retraction Watch about how irredeemable the scientific literature has become, as evidenced by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. citing a bogus scientific article during his Senate confirmation hearing and getting away with it.
The author of the paper, Anthony Mawson, runs an “institute” associated with his LLC in Jackson, MS. This institute last filed a 990 in 2021, where it had $57 in revenue, spent $81, and frittered away a loan of nearly $2,500 from the LLC — basically, it looks like Mawson taking money from Mawson to pay Mawson. And the “institute” seems inactive.
The article has no DOI, I could find no ISSN for the journal, and the journal itself is run by a notorious anti-vaccine group, with the domain registered by an extreme anti-vax activist with, of course, a Substack and a web site that looks like you would expect. This is the house the journal’s domain was registered from:
The journal — Science, Public Health Policy and the Law — seems to follow a populist naming convention for right-wing journals, as the current pick to head the NIH just helped launch another right-wing journal — Journal of the Academy of Public Health — in conjunction with RealClear Media. You can feel OA and open science being appropriated by political extremists, as reported by Wired:
Articles published so far include a review of a paper examining the association between vaccines and asthma, a critique of Covid vaccine trials, and a study that concluded that masks were not associated with lower Covid case rates. The journal also published an editorial from Kulldorf arguing that in some ways scientific journals “are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse.”
Like most of these things out in left field, some people at these journals have PhDs in unrelated fields (ecology, computer science), some seem to be just in it for the paycheck, and others are obvious grifters.
The fact that this paper — like crazy books in the White House, retracted papers at the Supreme Court, and preprints at media events during the height of Covid — got into the political system at all speaks to deeper problems with trust in science, respect for expertise, political corruption, how journals are established and validated, and who can claim knowledge.
Foreign adversaries may play a role. After all, the current Administration’s pro-Russia attitudes are widely known, the newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence is a Russian sympathizer, and those in the same political theater also routinely praise and model Putin’s white supremacist, anti-trans, homophobic policies.
Given this and China’s massive output of papers, not to mention the filching of identities by Russians to appear Ukranian, it’s worth remembering the FBI’s warning in 2020: