patrick.net

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/science-cafe-thursday-december-4

Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the people who actually ran the journals. In 2015 —the same year the Paxil story broke— former Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton finally snapped, and blurted out the truth like he was confessing to siphoning gas from his neighbor’s lawn mower:

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”

Perhaps half. Half! That’s not a statistical signal or a confidence interval. It’s a crime scene report.

Even the BMJ’s own former head editor, Fiona Godlee, admitted the field is “corrupted.” And not in the cute, old-fashioned way where the guy at the lab sneaks home a spare beaker. She meant intellectually corrupted— results engineered, journals captive, entire fields shaped by whoever has the fattest budget for “research support.”

Third: former New England Journal of Medicine Editor Marcia Angell (who spent twenty years guarding the temple) finally conceded the high priests were selling edible miracles in bulk:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published… I take no pleasure in this conclusion.”

It’s not possible to believe the research! That’s from the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, not some random TikTok alien theorist.

Finally, there’s controversial mathematician John Ioannidis, who coldly and logically ran the numbers. His famous 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” now has an eye-watering 3.3 million views and 9,000 citations. Ioannidis calmly proved, with data and statistics, and without sarcasm (showing heroic self-restraint), that modern research is structured so that false results are the expected output.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124

... And yet— medical authorities still lecture the public about “trusting the science” like a drunk uncle insisting he can drive. Paxil isn’t a ghost of scandals past. It’s a preview of the operating system we all lived under during the pandemic.

Bought studies. Captured journals. Silenced critics. Manufactured consensus. Same structure, bigger budget.

But the Paxil scandal may serve as more than a gruesome relic of the past. It could be a sign, an ignition point for a full-blown reckoning with what many now openly call “junk science.” More optimistically, just this year, Secretary Kennedy, FDA Commissioner Dr. Makary, and NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya all began pushing a radical overhaul of how medical science gets published. ...

At the heart of their plan: dismantle the luxury-journal cartel that has long protected industry-funded papers, restricted publication to a tiny oligopoly of gatekeepers, and rewarded pro-pharma results over truth. Under the terrific Make America Healthy Again Commission (MAHA) report —chaired by RFK— the administration pledged to “realign incentives,” restore transparency, and prioritize “gold-standard science, not special interests.”

As part of that effort, the newly confirmed NIH director (Bhattacharya) and FDA chief (Makary) aren’t just going through the motions. One of the very first things they did, racing right out of the starting gate, was to launch a competing journal explicitly meant to challenge the gatekeepers. Politico Pro, February:

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/02/trump-nominees-launch-science-journal-amid-washington-data-debate-00204191 (paywall)

It would be a massive understatement to say the big federal health agencies and their billions in annual grants direct the conversation. If nothing else, the impending shift in NIH standards at least threatens to end the corrupt old system, wherein pharmaceutical companies laundered regulatory influence using taxpayer-funded grant money, and top-tier journals translated that into prestige, citations, and sales pitches disguised as “clinical guidance.”

If anything, the pandemic proved how much worse things can get when you combine corrupted research with political power and real-time censorship. You might consider Paxil as the prototype.* Covid was the industrial release version. ...

Maybe the saddest part of all is how numb and unselfaware the establishment has become. Horton, Angell, Godlee, Ioannidis— they didn’t whisper. They shouted. And nobody with power wanted to hear it, because the money was good and the machine was running smoothly.

Last year saw Ioannidis walking around Stanford Mall. Absolutely sure it was him, mostly from having seen his picture, but also because he works only a few blocks away. I like it when I can prove to myself that people I read about on the internet actually exist, even if in just a small way like that chance sighting.