The flaws in the scientific journal peer review system undermine the argument that the freedom of individual patients should be subordinated to the judgements of “science.” A substantial, and not only recent, literature exposes a variety of flaws of the system. A recent impactful example is the failure of major medical journals to act in a timely manner to retract many Alzheimer’s studies where fraudulent images have been documented.
This impactful example is documented in painful detail in Charles Piller’s Doctored. The impact is that approaches to Alzheimer’s besides the mainstream’s amyloid hypothesis, have been suppressed, which may have slowed alternative effective therapies against the dread disease.
(p. C4) Suspicion of science journals was supercharged during the Covid pandemic, when most of them broadly supported mandates and lockdowns. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, now the head of the National Institutes of Health, was among the most prominent critics of such policies. He gained attention as a co-author of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting Covid spread, conferring “herd immunity” on the population, only to see his work shunned by the major science journals.
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The peer review system, in which a paper must go through scrutiny from experts, is intended as a form of quality control. But critics suggest that editors tilt the process toward papers that reflect their own favored results. In a May [2025] interview at the Hoover Institution, Bhattacharya said, “Folks think that if it is published in a top peer-reviewed journal, therefore it must be true, and that’s actually inaccurate.” In reality, he argued, “If I’m lucky the journal editor will send it out to two or three peer review editors, chosen by the editor. If they’re friendly with the editor, they’ll send it to friendly peer reviewers.”
Marty Makary, now the head of the Food and Drug Administration, was another prominent critic of science and medical journals during the pandemic. He said that some journals are captured by industry and others by groupthink. At NEJM and JAMA, “it’s clear that it was a group of like-minded friends, many of whom trained together or worked in the same hospital system,” Makary said. “Why should a small group of people be the gatekeepers of which research is read by most doctors in America?”
A 2023 paper in the journal PNAS on “scientific censorship by scientists” found flaws in the peer review system. A journal editor can quietly kill a submitted paper by sending it to hostile reviewers, who amplify minor methodological issues in order to reject a paper they disapprove of. “Many criteria that influence scientific decision-making, including novelty, interest, ‘fit,’ and even quality, are often ambiguous and subjective, which enables scholars to exaggerate flaws or make unreasonable demands to justify rejection of unpalatable findings,” the PNAS study found.
Often, part of what makes a paper “unpalatable” is its perceived politics. Science journals, like academia in general, have drawn increasing criticism for progressive bias. For example, in 2022 the journal Nature Human Behavior published an editorial stating that “considerations of harm can occasionally supersede the goal of seeking or sharing new knowledge,” including research that “may—inadvertently—stigmatize individuals or human groups” or be “discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic.”
“If anything gets published that doesn’t reflect the expected political view, then there is a public campaign to retract the paper,” said Luana Maroja, a professor of biology at Williams College. “Many times, they are successful.”
“I’ve received an anonymous peer review that said, ‘I’m afraid of what these findings will do for the laudable progressive moral agenda,’” said Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and lead author of the PNAS paper. Many researchers, she found, don’t bother asking questions that might lead to “wrong” answers, and if they do, they often don’t try to publish because they’ll only face resistance and blowback. Clark is now doing a study of journal editors, most of whom, she said, fear getting attacked or ostracized themselves.
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Donald Trump’s campaign for president in 2016 spurred some science journals to make political endorsements for the first time. Nature, a U.K.-based journal, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Editorials in the Lancet referred to the first Trump administration as “anti-scientific” and called the 2020 election “a fight for the health of the nation.” In a pre-election editorial in 2020, the NEJM called the Trump administration “dangerously incompetent,” writing: “We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”
For the full story see:
Pamela Paul. “How Scientific Journals Became MAGA’s Latest Target.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 14, 2025): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 13, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)
The PNAS article briefly summarized in a passage quoted above is:
Clark, Cory J., Lee Jussim, Komi Frey, Sean T. Stevens, Musa al-Gharbi, Karl Aquino, J. Michael Bailey, Nicole Barbaro, Roy F. Baumeister, April Bleske-Rechek, David Buss, Stephen Ceci, Marco Del Giudice, Peter H. Ditto, Joseph P. Forgas, David C. Geary, Glenn Geher, Sarah Haider, Nathan Honeycutt, Hrishikesh Joshi, Anna I. Krylov, Elizabeth Loftus, Glenn Loury, Louise Lu, Michael Macy, Chris C. Martin, John McWhorter, Geoffrey Miller, Pamela Paresky, Steven Pinker, Wilfred Reilly, Catherine Salmon, Steve Stewart-Williams, Philip E. Tetlock, Wendy M. Williams, Anne E. Wilson, Bo M. Winegard, George Yancey, and William von Hippel. “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists: A Perspective and Research Agenda.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 48 (Nov. 20, 2023): e2301642120.
Piller’s Doctored book that I mention in my introductory comments is:
Piller, Charles. Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s. New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025.
