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Scientific retraction is a unique — and bizarre — form of censorship, neither entirely blatant nor completely surreptitious.
Science journals extirpate disfavored articles that publish findings that run counter to the “scientific consensus” — itself an oxymoron. And they do it with great fanfare — no doubt with the intent to send a strong signal to those who might seek to publish anything in the same vein.
Although all kinds of things fade from memory or are simply proven wrong — including theories, texts, formulas, doctrines — nothing quite resembles scientific retraction, which Google’s AI defines as “a formal mechanism used by journals to notify the public that a published study is fundamentally unreliable.”
At least officially, eugenics fell into disrepute. Flat-Earthers are mocked at every turn. The doctrine of the divine right of kings is no longer accepted.
But all these changes happened without “scientific” retraction. The proponents and their arguments remain in history’s annals — they have not been erased. Public opinion just moved on, through discourse, wars and otherwise.
But that’s not enough for corporatist science. When it seeks to stamp out scientifically seditious ideas — like the ideas that vaccines are a driving cause of autism, or that unvaccinated children are vastly healthier than vaccinated children — it does so with zealous fervor.
The “science” censors seek to bombastically announce that these vaccine-related claims and the meticulous publications propounding them are forbidden, outlawed, unreliable! They need a reprimand far louder and harsher than simply quietly relegating the studies to dusty cyber shelves.
No, the authors must be excommunicated! The articles must be banished!
The retraction ritual has much in common with the ancient rite of stoning — let every scientist throw a stone. Let all in the scientific community collectively kill the messenger of apostate ideas. The articles and the authors must be discredited! Long live the reigning orthodoxy!
This ritual has recently been unleashed on my colleagues Brian Hooker and Neil Miller, scientists who published critical work comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated child health outcomes over six (!) years ago.
In these last-ditch efforts to staunch the public stampede away from vaccines, pharmaceutical megacorporations likely instructed their (lackey) journal editors to withdraw the article, “Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disorders” (SAGE Open Medicine 2020, doi: 10.1177/2050312120925344).
The editors do not make even a feeble attempt to justify this. No reasoning, no rationale — just that the public must be protected from wrongthink! The absurdity is self-evident. Such extraordinary paternalism has no place in any adult discourse, let alone in science.
The Anglo-Saxon legal system shares with science an intent to reach the truth through the adversarial process. Parties and theories are pitted against each other before qualified judges and juries. Then judgments are reviewed by qualified peer reviewers or appellate judges.
Sometimes the law changes, even radically. Yet past precedents or decisions are not “retracted.” Precedents may be overruled. Previous decisions may be vacated. But everything decided in the process remains in the record. Transcripts of hearings and court decisions may not be altered.
The same should be true in science — let new authors critique and discredit previous work, but let nothing be removed from the public record.
Without robust discourse and discord, science is dead. Could that indeed be the intent of the corporatist scientific retraction machine?
May real scientists excommunicate their censors!
