Science preprint sites consistently reject papers that challenge the official covid narrative

The aim of preprint servers is to allow researchers to publicise their research before submitting it to a journal for the formal review process and then publishing. This allowed researchers to share and receive feedback on their articles.  However, this all changed during the Covid era – any research that challenges the official Covid narrative is now rejected.

In an article, using specific examples, Professors Norman Fenton and Martin Neil describes the censorship their research has been and is subjected to by two preprint servers: medRvix and arXiv.  The two professors also refer to how Wikipedia defames and delegitimizes anyone who dares to raise concerns about, or even question, the official Covid narrative.

medRvix is a preprint server for health sciences. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.

[The] preprints [are] complete but unpublished manuscripts that describe human health research conducted, analysed, and interpreted according to scientific principles … medRxiv provides a platform for researchers to share, comment, and receive feedback on their work prior to journal publication … [It] aims to improve the openness and accessibility of scientific findings, enhance collaboration among researchers, document provenance of ideas, and inform ongoing and planned research. [emphasis our own]

medRvix, About medRxiv

arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for scholarly articles. It boasts it is a research-sharing platform open to anyone.

By Norman Fenton and Martin Neil

The whole point of research paper preprint sites like medRxiv and arXiv is that they are supposed to enable researchers to publicise their work prior to any formal review process. It used to be the case that, providing the material passed automated checks for plagiarism and offensive language, then it would be published within a couple of days.

But all that changed in the covid era. We have reported many times how all of our covid papers, that in any way challenge the ‘official narrative’, are now routinely rejected by both medRxiv and arXiv (see, for example, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE). As the twitter post below makes clear, this censorship is now openly stated by medRxiv:

By way of our most recent example, we submitted THIS paper containing a detailed analysis of the latest ONS vaccine mortality surveillance data to medRxiv on 9 November 2022. This is the response we got on 10 November 2022:

We regret to inform you that your manuscript is inappropriate for posting. medRxiv is intended for research papers, and our screening process determined that this manuscript fell short of that description.

At the same time (9 November 2022) we submitted the paper to arXiv. As is usual with arXiv we received a reply within hours stating that the paper would be published at 00.00 the next day, but (again as usual) this did not happen, and the paper appeared as ‘pending’ on the arXiv dashboard. When this happens, we always know it will be rejected by the censors. Often, they never reply at all, and it is left pending forever or is simply removed from the dashboard. However, this time we eventually got this email from arXiv Support <jira@arxiv-org.atlassian.net> on 9 December 2022:

Thank you for submitting your work to arXiv. We regret to inform you that arXiv’s moderators have determined that your submission will not be accepted and made public on [http://arxiv.org][arXiv.org|http://arxiv.org]. Our moderators have determined that your submission is on a topic not covered by arXiv or that the intended audience for your work is not a community we currently serve.

So, they rejected the paper as being out of scope. Which is curious given the enormous number of papers they have on covid data analytics (including a few of ours before we were writing stuff that challenged ‘the narrative’). But what is particularly curious in this case is that just 2 days earlier (7 December 2022) we got the following rejection (after several weeks) for a paper that focused on one particular part of the paper they rejected on 9 December, namely the statistical implications of the different estimates of proportion unvaccinated:

Thank you for submitting your work to arXiv. We regret to inform you that arXiv’s moderators have determined that your submission will not be accepted and made public on[ |http://arxiv.org][arXiv.org|http://arxiv.org]. Our moderators determined that your submission does not contain sufficient original or substantive scholarly research and is not of interest to arXiv.

So, even though both papers addressed the same topic, one was rejected on the basis that it was not sufficiently original, while the other was rejected on the basis it was out of scope.

This activity is a variant on a theme. Look at what happens on Wikipedia: ‘How Wikipedia defames and delegitimizes anybody raising concerns against the WHO narrative on Covid’

Norman was interviewed by Bret Weinstein, on the DarkHorse Podcast about this experience. [Click on the image below to watch the video on Odysee.]

[DarkHorse Podcast has split this interview into shorter segments on YouTube, watch HERE.  You can also listen to this podcast on Spotify HERE.]

Fortunately (for the time being at least) it seems ResearchGate has not been censoring papers on covid and hence we have had no difficulty in putting our papers there.

A full list of our covid papers can be found HERE.

About the Authors

Norman Fenton and Martin Neil are two academic professors who, between them, have authored hundreds of scientific papers and numerous books on statistics, decision making, risk and uncertainty systems and software engineering, and have consulted commercially to scores of commercial organisations.  Together, they publish articles on a Substack page titled ‘Where are the numbers?’. If you are interested in science and statistics in the post-Covid era, you can subscribe to and follow their Substack HERE.