A Strange Trip Through Elsevier

A retracted preprint within Elsevier gets accepted by an Elsevier journal — and the problems are legion

About a year ago, a preprint claiming that Covid vaccination was associated with 73.9% of Covid deaths according to autopsy findings appeared on Preprints with the Lancet, a branded silo of SSRN — all Elsevier brands.

The preprint was removed within 48 hours, with this message:

This preprint has been removed by Preprints with The Lancet because the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology. Preprints with The Lancet reserves the right to remove a paper that has been posted if we determine that it has violated our screening criteria.

I noted at the time that six of the nine authors of the preprint were affiliated with the Wellness Company, a purveyor of supplements and “Freedom from Pharma” ideas.

Red flags abounded.

Now, about a year later, the paper has been accepted by another Elsevier outlet, this time the journal Forensic Science International.

There’s every reason to believe this is a retraction-in-waiting — because another, supposedly less-stringent Elsevier outlet already retracted it, in effect.

It’s worth taking a harder look at the authors of this paper, where it becomes clear that anyone with 15 minutes, access to a good search engine, and a lick of sense would have sent this paper packing:

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