By Peter C. Gøtzsche

Only two days after the Journal of the Academy of Public Health‘s official launch, Science Magazine criticised it in a news item. A scientist I had recommended as a member of our Academy wrote to me that the fact that Science feared our new journal suggested that we were on the right track.

Indeed. Science scored an own goal by illustrating so clearly what is wrong with the legacy media and traditional scientific journals. It started out with denigrating remarks about the journal being the brainchild of President Donald Trump’s pick to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff “who became known for his opposition to lockdowns, child vaccination, and other public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its editorial board also includes Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty [wrongly spelled as Martin] Makary, who also opposed vaccine mandates.”

Why did Science mention that Trump picked Jay and Marty? This is irrelevant for any scientific judgments about these people. And what was wrong with their positions during the pandemic? Nothing. 

Sweden did not lock down and yet had one of the lowest mortalities in the world. To vaccinate children against COVID-19 down to 6 months of age as in USA is highly likely harmful, and we have not recommended this in Europe. Many people, me included, have argued against vaccine mandates and it was never a requirement in Denmark to become vaccinated against COVID-19. Such mandates are ethically and scientifically indefensible and can increase vaccine hesitancy for vaccines in general.  

Science’s denigration continued: “The journal, which has already published eight articles on topics including COVID-19 vaccine trials and mask mandates, eschews several aspects of traditional publishing. It lacks a subscription paywall.” 

“Lacks” a paywall? This is a negative statement, although it is positive not to have a paywall like Science has. And mask mandates? There is no need to mandate whole populations to dress as bank robbers given masking’s tenuous – and potentially nonexistent – benefits on a population level. 

Since only members of the Academy of Public Health can submit articles, Science is worried that the journal will be used “to sow doubt about scientific consensus on matters such as vaccine efficacy and safety.”

Scientific consensus is rare, and even when it exists, it has often been proven wrong by later research. Science is the opposite of consensus. The status quo should be challenged, and free scientific debate – that so many traditional journals have suppressed – moves science forward. There are many good reasons why some top scientists have abandoned publishing in top scientific journals, and they include censorship, and financial and other conflicts of interest among anonymous peer reviewers, editors and journal owners.

All my life, I have produced numerous scientific results that went against the so-called scientific consensus, and when my opponents had no valid counterarguments, they called me controversial. I realised that this denigrating term always meant that my results threatened financial or other conflicts of interest, not least guild interests. When my statistician and I had demonstrated in 1999 that mammography screening might do more harm than good, which I have confirmed many times ever since, a journalist wrote that there is nothing that hurts like the truth about healthcare.

It is not enough for Science to cast doubt about our new journal by referring to Trump: “JAPH is a nonprofit subsidiary of the Real Clear Foundation, itself a donor-financed nonprofit that has attracted support from major funders of conservative causes, according to The New York Times. Kulldorff and many other members of the 21-person editorial board have attracted criticism for their views and research during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Ah well, I am one of these 21 people and I know many of the others. We are anything but conservative. We try to keep an open mind and are not easily fooled by fraudsters. In 2023, I explained that the origin of COVID-19 is the biggest cover up in medical history. And on 31 January 2025, I tweeted: “The CIA said Saturday that it’s more likely a lab leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic than an infected animal that spread the virus to people. They are very slow at the CIA. I have known this for five years and have written a lot about it incl a whole book.” 

Science lamented that Jay, Martin and Sunetra Gupta, also an editorial board member, authored the Great Barrington Declaration that opposed lockdowns. But yet again, they were right and Science and most other journals were wrong.

Science said that Jay and John Ioannidis, the most cited medical scientist and another board member, “drew fire in 2020 for a study that claimed SARS-CoV-2 had infected far more people than currently thought, and was therefore far less dangerous than assumed.” This was totally misleading. Jay has explained how they were exposed to inappropriate attacks and censorship from Stanford where they worked. Their initial results, that the infection fatality rate was only 0.2%, were reproduced in other studies. 

They first published their results as a preprint, in April 2020. If their results had been accepted at the time, instead of being roundly condemned, also in the media, the draconian lockdowns could have been avoided, as they showed that the virus spread very rapidly. 

Science and the COVID-19 pandemic

Since Science criticised us so heavily for our COVID research and views, even though we were correct, we should look at what Science’s own role has been. It claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines are 100% effective against severe disease, which wasn’t even correct when Science made the claim because we knew that respiratory viruses mutate fast.  

I wrote in my book, The Chinese virus, that Beijing’s useful idiots included Science, which was overly friendly with Peter Daszak – whose EcoHealth Alliance channelled an NIH grant to Wuhan to fund the highly dangerous gain-of-function research, which he denied. 

In February 2020, Science reported that scientists “strongly condemn” rumours and conspiracy theories about the origin of the pandemic. If you have no arguments, you raise your voice. This sentence does not belong in a scientific journal but in a tabloid, and it cannot be a conspiracy theory to suggest that the virus escaped from a lab and was likely manufactured there. In the same article, Daszak said that “We’re in the midst of the social media misinformation age,” but forgot to say he was the main driver of it. 

In 2020, researchers sent a modelling study to Science arguing that herd immunity would be achieved earlier than the usual estimates of an infection rate of 60-80% of the population. Science admitted that the paper was rejected for political reasons: “Given the implications for public health, it is appropriate to hold claims around the herd immunity threshold to a very high evidence bar, as these would be interpreted to justify relaxation of interventions, potentially placing people at risk.” Science was concerned that opponents of lockdown would use the paper to undermine the policy. The lead author said she might leave the field because every paper she had written on this issue had been rejected with the claim that it was not useful or new.

In November 2021, Science published an almost 5,000-word article about Daszak that told nothing new. A reporter had spent seven hours with Daszak to put a nice gloss on him. A photo of Daszak appeared on Science’s front page with the title of the article: Prophet in purgatory: Peter Daszak is fighting accusations that his work on the pandemic prevention helped spark COVID-19.

Science published this when the death toll was about 6 million and depicted Daszak as a hero who works on preventing pandemics when it is extremely likely that he and “the bat lady,” Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, created one, which he had covered up for in two years.

Science didn’t care much about conflicts of interest either. When NIH’s David Morens praised Daszak, they didn’t tell the readers that he was Daszak’s funder, colleague and co-author. Science mentioned that Freedom of Information Act requests by the US Right to Know and others had uncovered inconvenient truths, but it used Angela Rasmussen to dismiss this as “weaponized FOIA requests.” She was the one who, in Nature Medicine, called it a world-wide conspiracy when people discussed a possible lab leak. It is still the case that there is not a thread of good evidence that the virus has a natural origin but a lot that tells us it was produced in a laboratory in Wuhan.

Wait and see

In the Science article, Kulldorff said that people had a right to be worried about what might happen and added that our journal should be judged on its output a year or more from now, once it’s more established. I agree. I am very enthusiastic about the journal. And this is not because I cannot publish in traditional journals. I am the only Dane that has over 100 publications in “the big five” (BMJ, The Lancet, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, and Annals of Internal Medicine).  

Disclosures, Funding & Conflicts of Interest

None. 

Affiliations:

Peter C Gøtzsche, Professor emeritus, Institute for Scientific Freedom, Copenhagen, DK 

This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.