"This is what The Lancet now stands for... they don’t care anymore..."

Diagnostic pathologist Dr Clare Craig on the scientific and medical publishing industry

Mar 25, 2026

Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)

Further to this article…

"The World Health Organization have become a real wolf in sheep’s clothing..."

…this post features the next section of this recent podcast with Tom Nelson and diagnostic pathologist Dr Clare Craig, author of the recently published book Spiked: A shot in the dark. The discussion, starting at 09:26, focuses on the scientific and medical publishing industry. A transcript plus additional links and comments is below.

[Nelson] It does sound like this whole handling of covid was a huge wake-up call for you… where you don’t believe a lot of stuff that you did maybe six or seven years ago. That’s been the case with me… it’s been a huge eye-opener…
[Craig] Absolutely. One of my children said to me the other day, “Mum, can you imagine having a conversation with 2019-you?” And it was a slightly frightening concept actually, because I think [the 2019-me] would not handle the stuff I would need to say to her… And maybe I wouldn’t need to say it… she can learn it slowly…
I have always been a very compliant person. I’ve never had a rebellious bone in my body, ever. And I have always had a lot of faith in medicine and faith in science. And I trusted institutions fundamentally, and I trusted the media, and I trusted the political set-up. And… all of those things have potential to do good…
I think we deserve to be able to live in countries where we can trust these things. I think it’s too much to expect every individual to be constantly challenging every single thing. It’s overwhelming, right? So I want to get back to a place where we can, but, at the moment, these systems aren’t functioning properly. They’re not serving the public. In fact they’re doing the opposite. And it needs challenge.
[Nelson] Do you see any way where we can get back… in the next maybe 10 years or something… we can get back to where there’s organizations that we can trust?
[Craig] I hate this question so much… Yes, there must be a way. I don’t think I’ve got the answers. And there are definitely days when I think to myself, “Is there any example of a failed institution historically that has got back on the rails, or do you have to start with a parallel one?” And I find that a difficult question to answer. I go digging… and I’m not sure that you can reset institutional failure very easily.
Having said that, there are some aspects of the world we live in where doing things differently is an option. One of the key ones, one of the really easy wins, is the science and medical publishing industry. We have an industry that is based on paper journals, with universities paying subscriptions and libraries paying subscriptions… and a few individuals as well. And it’s morphed over time to be something that is a really big problem, whereby there’s a lot of pharmaceutical capture… and it’s been admitted for 20 years including by editors of these journals whose job it is to ensure there isn’t pharmaceutical capture.

I am reminded of Prof Norman Fenton, who I featured in this post…

Fighting Goliath (part 1)

September 21, 2024

Read full story

…who has stated, and with good reason, that:

The entire process of academic peer review has become so corrupted and disfunctional [sic] that it is almost meaningless. And, as our own experience with The Lancet indicates, that the more ‘prestigious’ the journals the less the value of what they publish.

And particularly of this article from Maryanne Demasi, PhD:

Problems that have plagued medical journals for decades include the failure of peer review, replication crisis, ghost-writing, and the influence of Big Pharma.

She cites several notable figures:

In 2004, Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet wrote, “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”
More recently, Peter Gøtzsche, one of the founding fathers of the Cochrane Collaboration said, “The medical publishing system is broken. It doesn’t ensure that solid research which goes against financial interests can get published without any major obstacles…”
Former editor of The BMJ Richard Smith once famously wrote; “Peer review is faith not evidence based, but most scientists believe in it as some people believe in the Loch Ness monster.”

Richard Horton, Peter Gøtzsche and Richard Smith

And she goes on to recount a recent conversation with Smith:

“Peer review was thought to be at the heart of science… and I suppose it wasn’t until the 80s and 90s that somebody actually examined it — it was just sort of assumed to be a good thing,” said Smith.
“Then people began a series of experiments — there was a Cochrane review — looking at the evidence to see if peer-review was beneficial. And actually, what they found was that there was really no evidence,” he said.
Smith, who worked at The BMJ for 25 years said the peer-review process is slow, it’s expensive, and it stifles the publication of innovative ideas.
“There are lots of examples of ground-breaking work that were rejected by peer-reviewers but go on to win Nobel Prizes. Is the work crazy? Or is it truly genius? Peer review is not good at deciding that,” he said.

Demasi also points out that:

Peer review also fails to detect fraud. The recent Surgisphere scandal is a case in point.
The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine were forced to retract studies after researchers reported a link between treatment with hydroxychloroquine and increased death of hospitalised covid patients.
Glaring discrepancies were found in the database underpinning the studies, but were not detected in the peer-review process.
“If researchers say there were 200 patients in the study, then you assume there were. But we have increasing evidence that that’s not the case - there are a lot of zombie trials that never happened or have been manipulated in some way,” said Smith.
“So, in a nutshell, we have lots and lots of evidence of the downside of peer review and really no convincing evidence of its upside,” he added.

Back to the podcast…

[Craig] There is a lot of terrible science that gets through what they call peer review, but none of the peer reviewers are paid to do it [and] it’s very time consuming. So of course things get through if that’s your method of checking. There’s a reproducibility crisis… where that kind of work doesn’t get funded.
But just in terms of publications, with the internet we can crowdsource scientific debate… and we can just have open access to the work that’s often government-funded and ends up behind a paywall… and just say, “Look, enough… this publishing industry is not benefiting anybody…” By all means have Nature and Science who can [act as] the news aspect of what’s going on in the science world… picking out the best things to share. But fundamentally, [the scientific and medical publishing industry] needs to be flattened and shared and open to everybody. And I think that’s something that… should have happened already and that could yet happen without too much pain.
[Nelson] How about the current Wild West type of thing where people put up a paper, and then on X or on your own Substack you can dig into it and people can find out more about it that way?
[Craig] I love that in some regards. I have found it very educational, especially when people are critiquing existing work. It’s a great way of seeing where the flaws are. The problem with it is that it is frowned upon by the establishment and by people in the mainstream who use peer review as a way to gatekeep what they have to work on…
I’ll give you… a nice example. There was a paper recently in The Lancet and it was claiming to be a review of children and young adults in the UK… making the claim that myocarditis [inflammation of the heart muscle] is more common after the [covid] virus than the vaccine, which is a claim that we know is not true. So when they published this… in fact, even before they published this… it hits the mainstream… has tons of traction… basically the usual story, “Wasn’t it great that we jabbed all these kids?”

In relation to the “claim that we know is not true” — that myocarditis is more common after the virus than the vaccine, I am reminded of this post in which I featured a shocking Pfizer report that the MHRA have been keeping quiet about:

Here is the recent paper in The Lancet which is freely available for anyone to read in full:

And here, for example, is a related Independent article from November:

During the pandemic, a connection emerged between the Covid-19 vaccine and an increased likelihood of myocarditis and pericarditis but new data has revealed that the risks were much higher with an infection.
After vaccination however, we see that risks were slightly lower than the background levels, probably likely reflecting the protective effect of vaccination here.
Co-author Prof William Whiteley, of the University of Edinburgh and associate director at the BHF [British Heart Foundation] Data Science Centre, added: “Parents, young people, and children need reliable information to make decisions about their health.”
“Data from hospitals and GP practices are an important part of the picture because they tell us all what has happened to people looked after in the NHS.”
Experts said the findings, published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, “are of great importance for national policy makers and caregivers considering vaccination consent for children”.
They also “support the public health strategy of Covid-19 vaccination in children and young people to mitigate the more frequent and persistent risks associated” with infection, researchers added.

I am reminded of this quote, which is often attributed to Mark Twain:

A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on

I wonder how much money the British Heart Foundation has received from e.g. pharmaceutical companies over the past few years.

Back to the podcast…

[Craig] And it was not great that we jabbed all these kids. That was one of those papers where you’re like, “Okay, this has got enough red flags that it’s worth spending some time on.” And I spent a lot of time on it. And I found so many ways in which they were deceptive with the data. It was extraordinary. I don’t think I can even remember them all.
They were doing things like… when they compared the post-infection period, they included very young children and babies, and they included people who had turned 18 or even 19 by the end of the study… And those [older] groups have a much higher background rate of myocarditis. And… over a longer time frame they compared that to the 5- to 17-year-olds after the vaccine. [And] we all know that the problem [is] in 18- and 19-year olds. And… the numbers of 18- and 19-year-olds completely swamps the data… so that’s the sort thing they were doing. It was all very, very wrong and easily shown to be wrong on their own terms.
So I wrote a letter to The Lancet editor. Now, when you do this you get told that there’s a 250 word limit… and I had a lot of words to share with that editor. And I couldn’t get it down to anything like 250. I got it down to 750 with the help of AI… I couldn’t have done it without a bit of AI succinctness. And I submitted it. And I [acknowledged]… I know this is too long [but] you need to read every word.

Here is the 750-word letter…

…which, unlike the original 6,000+ word article, The Lancet has put behind a paywall.

The full text is available here.

[Craig] And they did [read what I wrote], to be fair on them. And they published it [two months later]… alongside three other letters [from people] who also were noticing huge errors in this paper. And after that had happened, another doctor, who I’m in touch with, said they’d found more errors still that hadn’t yet been mentioned… and what should he do about it? And I’m like, “Well, actually, we should be calling for a retraction of this paper. It’s had massive mainstream traction. It’s clearly wrong. It needs to be retracted.” And the authors admitted some of these mistakes in response to my letter, but not the others. They just ignored the others.
So we wrote a retraction letter and sent it to the editor, and [just this last week] I got a response. And they said, “We see that there’s no reason to take this any further.” The end. Okay…
And the thing is that I’m not into retracting papers… I’m not sure that that’s how science should work. And retracting papers has been something that’s happened a lot more recently, and it can be used to attack people you just don’t agree with. And it has been used… and we’ve seen papers retracted which were great papers… they should be in the published world… and then you can have a debate and you can show other things. But you don’t just pull a paper if there’s nothing wrong with it.
[But] if there’s something really wrong with it… well maybe you should pull it, which is why I’m pursuing this one, because it’s so completely wrong. But… I don’t know what else you do. What else do you do? I’m just going to share the letter I wrote to The Lancet and say, “Look, this is what The Lancet now stands for… they don’t care anymore…”
[Nelson] The way that you pursue this stuff with so much determination… I totally love it…
[Craig] Thank you… It’s a really odd thing to me… As I said, I was a compliant person. I also wasn’t somebody who wrote letters of complaint and who actually acted on anything… And I would say that I’ve learned a huge amount from the people around me who are just so much more onto “What are we going to do? Let’s do something.” And actually, [while] there’s a limit to what we can do… there are things we can do… things we can all do. And it is worth doing them. And it always feels so good when you’re doing something instead of just moaning about it all.