Streisand Effect, & McCullough/Seneff paper 1.6
1.6 due diligence on authors, journal, and Wikipedia account of paper/journal
This showed up in my mailbox today. It is an opinion piece, wherein a group of scientists describe their failed efforts to block the publication of a research paper back in spring 2022 by McCullough, Seneff, Nigh, and Kriakopoulos.
The Streisand Effect occurs when the efforts to steer people’s attention away from a subject only results in them paying even more attention to it. Reuters and Associated Press succeeded in doing this with their factchecks of the Mansanguan article last week.
Medscape has chosen a rather inflammatory excerpt from the paper in order to pique interest - or perhaps to imply that the paper is extreme in its viewpoint:
So now that Medscape has published this fact-check-ish type article, I am now motivated to read the article that they are saying should never have been published in the first place - the article by McCullough, Seneff et al.
This will involve extended due diligence, of both the journal that published the controversial article, as well as the writers of both the original article and the “factcheck” article, as well as the funding source of the website that published the factcheck article. This will be in updated versions of the same substack.
For now, I will content myself to say that someone went to a lot of trouble to try to discredit the McCullough/Seneff article and appears to continue their campaign, despite the article having been published back in April 2022.
1.6 Due Diligence on original article, and excursis into Wikipedia
Authors: Dr McCullough has 676 articles indexed in PubMed, 15 in 2022 alone. Kryiakopoulos, 19 articles. Prof. Seneff has 14 articles in PubMed. Greg Nigh, 5 articles.
Journal: Food and Chemical Toxicology was founded in 1963, is peer-reviewed, and indexed by PubMed. Here is a Wikipedia entry, which interestingly includes a report on the effort to get the paper retracted. There is also mention of the journal’s publication of a controversial paper re tumorigenic effects of GMO corn and glyphosate in mice from 2012.
The wikipedia page on the journal describes the controversy re McCullough et al as follows:
“In 2022, after a call from the editor for articles on alleged adverse effects of the Covid-19 vaccine,[7] a notorious spreader of Covid-19 fake news, Seneff et al. published a paper alleging various mechanisms for various diseases that the authors intend to link to Covid-19 vaccination.[8]
Several scientists have warned of the biases and shortcomings that this article contains.[9] After questioning the competence of the scientists, whom he did not seem to have about the article (Written by a computer scientist, a naturopathic oncologist and a cardiologist), the editor concluded that these unsubstantiated claims were part of the scientific analysis debate and declined any disclosures that might limit the damage of this paper on public health.[10] This paper has been the subject of numerous criticisms by Jacques Robert,[11] professor emeritus at the University of Bordeaux, and David Gorski, another eminent specialist in scientific fraud.” (bolded emphasis mine)
The naturopath is Greg Nigh, the cardiologist is Dr McCullough. Professor Seneff has written several peer-reviewed articles in the field of toxicology. According to her own bio, her PhD is in computer science, and she has been working in the field of toxicology since 2008.
Wikipedia does not mention the fourth author, Anthony Kryiakopoulos for some reason. He is an MD/PhD from Greece and molecular microbiologist, who heads up a research institute there.
So much then for due diligence on the authors and the journal.
JM, thinking you're the right person to look into this.
https://twitter.com/IsKarma4Real/status/1562830622304772098?s=20&t=hV9PAcHfVOs9FinI4qnY8g