Science Journals Publish C-19 Pro-Lockdown Reports, Censor Anti-Lockdown Studies

‘Our Work Was Effectively Censored’

The report by Mr. Hanke, Lars Jonung and Jonas Herby (HJH), titled “Did lockdowns work? The verdict on COVID restrictions,” concluded that lockdowns were “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions.” This study has faced rejection from mainstream medical publishers, while studies that praise lockdowns are being published, and amplified by the media.

“The SSRN allowed the authors of the linked article to upload their work, while our work was effectively censored,” Mr. Hanke said. “Why?  Our results went against the dogma of officialdom.”

An article by Mr. Hanke and colleagues, responding to their critics, was also rejected by SSRN, Mr. Hanke said.

In both cases, SSRN stated that the rejection was due to “the need to be cautious about posting medical content.” This appears to be a new criterion and inconsistent with SSRN guidelines, which preclude material that is “illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, infringing of intellectual property rights, invasive of privacy or otherwise injurious or objectionable.”

By contrast, a report published by SSRN in September, titled “SARS-CoV-2 lineage importations and spread are reduced after nonpharmaceutical interventions,” gave a favorable evaluation of lockdowns. “Nonpharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) is the new euphemism for lockdowns, mask mandates, travel bans and other suspensions of civil rights during pandemics.

“Ultimately, SARS-CoV-2 was eliminated during the study period due to contact tracing and mandatory quarantine measures,” the report stated, referring to state restrictions in Hong Kong. In Switzerland, the authors wrote, “strict border closures alongside the 2020 partial lockdown were effective in controlling the entrance of new [COVID] lineages into the country.”

An August report titled “COVID-19: examining the effectiveness of nonpharmaceutical interventions,” published by the Royal Society, a “fellowship” of eminent scientists, states: “One of the most important lessons from this pandemic is that the effective application of NPIs ‘buys time’ to allow the development and manufacturing of drugs and vaccines. There is every reason to think that implementing packages of NPIs will be important in future pandemics.”

A group called factcheck.org did their own analysis of Mr. Hanke’s work, citing other academicians who criticized him and emphasizing that the HJH study was not peer reviewed.

“There have been a lot of studies assessing whether and to what extent so-called ‘lockdowns’ and various NPIs have been effective, and plenty of research that has concluded these measures can limit transmission, or reduce cases and deaths,” Factcheck stated.

Inquiry, a medical journal, also refused to publish the HJH paper critical of lockdowns. According to correspondence between Inquiry and the authors, the journal initially requested a peer review by three relevant subject experts.

As the next step in the publishing process, the HJH paper did receive three favorable reviews by Inquiry’s reviewers, Mr. Hanke said. However, shortly after receiving the reviews the executive editor of Inquiry retracted them.

“In my long academic career of nearly 60 years, I have never encountered such a thing,” Mr. Hanke said. “Indeed, I’ve never even heard of such a thing. It’s truly unprecedented and outrageous.”

In a joint op-ed in Econ Journal Watch, Dr. Bhattacharya and Mr. Hanke stated that “there is nothing that matches a looming pandemic to generate fear, and there is nothing like fear to grease the skids of censorship.”

The authors suggested a pattern of government and media cooperation to silence dissent.

“First come the ‘fact checkers’ who produce unfounded, irrelevant verbiage that lacks critical sense or analytical insight,” they wrote. “Next come [media] hit pieces that echo the claims of the so-called fact checkers.”

Preprint servers are online repositories that post academic papers.

“Specifically, MedRxiv and SSRN have been reluctant to post articles critical of the CDC, mask and vaccine mandates, and the Biden administration’s health care policies,” Dr. Prasad writes. “Preprint servers are not supposed to be journals— they are not supposed to reject articles merely because the people running them disagree with the arguments within.”

When Dr. Prasad and his colleague Dr. Alyson Haslam wrote a report about their COVID work being censored, SSRN declined to publish that as well, he says.

Dr. Bhattacharya claims that he has also been censored by MedRxiv regarding his analysis that criticized lockdowns. In 2020, he and colleagues Christopher Oh and John Ioannidis, led by Stanford University infectious disease professor Eran Bendavid, conducted a comparison of countries like Sweden and South Korea that did not have government lockdowns against countries that did, and found no statistically significant benefit from mandatory orders on COVID spread.

According to Dr. Bhattacharya, “MedRxiv refused to post the piece, telling the authors that the topic was too sensitive to permit the publication of a preprint, even though the site teemed with modeling analyses purporting to demonstrate the efficacy of lockdowns in limiting the spread of COVID.”

Having published an extended version of their findings in book form, Mr. Hanke and his co-authors are continuing their efforts to also share their study in mainstream medical journals, he said.

“We anticipate that the paper will receive a fair and favorable review and will be published,” Mr. Hanke said.

The Epoch Times reached out to SSRN and Inquiry for comment regarding this article but did not receive a response as of press time.