This is the super dangerous strategy of the Alt-Right and allies.
There is of course a rise and fall of scientific journals over the years but in the past this was more driven by scientific interests than by providing a scientific backup of political decisions. What if we can’t rely on PubMed anymore?
PubMed is incredibly reliable. And a lot depends on it. It’s an ecosystem built around MEDLINE, the steady feed of new publications in biomedicine: It determines which journals count, takes their output in, adds valuable information and linkages, and feeds it back out – free to users globally. And there’s a lot more, too, that we rely on from the NCBI (the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the NIH’s National Library of Medicine).
Last month a prominent right-wing dark money group launched its own Academy Public Health journal to compete with other medical journals.
At first blush, the RealClear Foundation’s foray into public health research looks like serious venture. The academy’s webpage claims it is an “international association public health scholars, researchers and practicing professionals in the field of public health and its many specialties,” and declares that “members are united in their commitment to open discourse, intellectual rigor and broad, equitable access to scientific discovery.”
Carl Bergstrom was the first to note the anti-vaxxer clique
The bylaws reveal a wild sort of National Academy of Sciences cosplay, dialed up to eleven and designed to exclude everybody except fellow…er…contrarians. Only members can publish, new members are brought in by existing ones, and the editor-in-chief cannot reject members’ peers.
Who is on the editorial board? It looks like a COVID-19 misinformation rehabilitation group
Martin Kulldorff, PhD
Andrew Noymer, MSc, PhD
Carl Heneghan, BM, DPhil
Christine Stabell Benn, MD, PhD, DMSc
David Livermore, PhD
Günter Kampf, MD
Helen Colhoun, DMed, MPH
Jayanta Bhattacharya, MD, PhD
John Ioannidis, MD, DSc
Maged Kamel Boulos, MD, PhD
Marty Makary, MD, MPH
Mohammad Ali Mansournia, MD, MPH, PhD
Peter Gøtzsche, MD, DMSc, MSc
Ruth Gil Prieto, PhD
Sander Greenland, DrPH
Scott Atlas, MD
Sergio Recuenco, MD, MPH, DrPH
Simon Wood, PhD
Sunetra Gupta, PhD
Tom Jefferson, MD, MSc
Walker Bergman is going through all the names – basically all of them have been prominent voices in discussions about COVID-19, infectious disease modeling, vaccine effectiveness, and public health policies.
Several, such as Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya, were involved in the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized strict lockdown measures and advocated for focused protection of vulnerable populations during the pandemic.
Others, like John Ioannidis and Carl Heneghan, have been critical of certain public health responses. While they are not right-wing themselves, their ideas have been embraced by right-leaning or libertarian political groups. More recently some names have become more famous as reported by WIRED.