Almost a year ago, I wrote about a terrible article that was published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. FiPH is a legitimate, peer-reviewed journal, and they had just published a manuscript that was straight-up HIV denial, titled “Questioning the HIV-AIDS hypothesis: 30 years of dissent.” At the time, it was listed as a regular review article; after much outrage, it was re-titled into an “opinion” statement, but not retracted.
Now another “Frontiers In” journal has stepped in it, publishing a paper that has the anti-vaccine groupies frothing at the mouth. Published in Frontiers in Neurology this time, the paper, “Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum
adjuvants of vaccines,” is another review article using cherry-picked data to suggest that aluminum in vaccines accumulates in the brain and nervous system, causing “toxic effects.”
The editor of this paper is Lucija Tomljenovic of the University of British Columbia. Tomljenovic is a biochemist who has made a career, with her advisor Chris Shaw, of publishing commentary suggesting that vaccines, and particularly the HPV vaccine and vaccine adjuvants, are unsafe. It probably will not shock readers that Shaw and Tomljenovic are funded in part by the The Dwoskin Family Foundation and the Katlyn Fox Foundation, both of which are big players in the anti-vaccine community (see this post at Harpocrates Speaks for more background info on those foundations). Both appeared at the 2011 Vaccine Safety Conference, with other notable vaccine foes including the NVIC’s Barbara Loe Fisher and Lawrence Palevsky, a doctor who appeared in the anti-vaccine movie “The Greater Good” and apparently spoke on the topic, “Rethinking the Germ Theory.” That should speak volumes about the scientific validity of the movement. Meanwhile, Shaw specifically notes in his bio, “He has two children. The youngest has not been vaccinated.”
Who else appeared at that meeting? The first author of the current paper, Romain K. Gherardi.
Others have already posted stinging critiques of Shaw and Tomljenovic’s previous papers (even the World Health Organization has criticized them), so I won’t go further into the science–suffice it to say, Shaw & Tomljenovic are cited widely within the review, and several other important citations are self-citations of the first author, Gherardi. It should be noted that Gherardi also receives funding from the Dwoskin Foundation. Further, Tomljenovic served not only as the paper’s editor, but also as a reviewer–and the Frontiers In journals as a whole have a crazy-high acceptance rate of 80-90% in the first place. Another reviewer, Mark Burns, is on FN’s editorial board.
So while the anti-vaccine brigade will count this publication as a victory, it’s really just another case of a poor paper being published in a shoddy journal, shepherded to publication by a like-minded editor–and you could certainly at least argue there was a conflict of interest here, with both Gherardi and Tomljenovic funded by the Dwoskins and running in the same small anti-vaccine circles. Not that it matters to those who will gleefully cite this publication, of course. The only time they really want to “follow the money” or pay attention to such matters is when the money is coming from “Big Pharma” or the government or other such boogeymen in order to allege some kind of conspiracy. Too bad they don’t hold all publications up to such lofty standards, or recognize conspiracy when it’s actually in their own backyard.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1N7M2Dd
Almost a year ago, I wrote about a terrible article that was published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. FiPH is a legitimate, peer-reviewed journal, and they had just published a manuscript that was straight-up HIV denial, titled “Questioning the HIV-AIDS hypothesis: 30 years of dissent.” At the time, it was listed as a regular review article; after much outrage, it was re-titled into an “opinion” statement, but not retracted.
Now another “Frontiers In” journal has stepped in it, publishing a paper that has the anti-vaccine groupies frothing at the mouth. Published in Frontiers in Neurology this time, the paper, “Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum
adjuvants of vaccines,” is another review article using cherry-picked data to suggest that aluminum in vaccines accumulates in the brain and nervous system, causing “toxic effects.”
The editor of this paper is Lucija Tomljenovic of the University of British Columbia. Tomljenovic is a biochemist who has made a career, with her advisor Chris Shaw, of publishing commentary suggesting that vaccines, and particularly the HPV vaccine and vaccine adjuvants, are unsafe. It probably will not shock readers that Shaw and Tomljenovic are funded in part by the The Dwoskin Family Foundation and the Katlyn Fox Foundation, both of which are big players in the anti-vaccine community (see this post at Harpocrates Speaks for more background info on those foundations). Both appeared at the 2011 Vaccine Safety Conference, with other notable vaccine foes including the NVIC’s Barbara Loe Fisher and Lawrence Palevsky, a doctor who appeared in the anti-vaccine movie “The Greater Good” and apparently spoke on the topic, “Rethinking the Germ Theory.” That should speak volumes about the scientific validity of the movement. Meanwhile, Shaw specifically notes in his bio, “He has two children. The youngest has not been vaccinated.”
Who else appeared at that meeting? The first author of the current paper, Romain K. Gherardi.
Others have already posted stinging critiques of Shaw and Tomljenovic’s previous papers (even the World Health Organization has criticized them), so I won’t go further into the science–suffice it to say, Shaw & Tomljenovic are cited widely within the review, and several other important citations are self-citations of the first author, Gherardi. It should be noted that Gherardi also receives funding from the Dwoskin Foundation. Further, Tomljenovic served not only as the paper’s editor, but also as a reviewer–and the Frontiers In journals as a whole have a crazy-high acceptance rate of 80-90% in the first place. Another reviewer, Mark Burns, is on FN’s editorial board.
So while the anti-vaccine brigade will count this publication as a victory, it’s really just another case of a poor paper being published in a shoddy journal, shepherded to publication by a like-minded editor–and you could certainly at least argue there was a conflict of interest here, with both Gherardi and Tomljenovic funded by the Dwoskins and running in the same small anti-vaccine circles. Not that it matters to those who will gleefully cite this publication, of course. The only time they really want to “follow the money” or pay attention to such matters is when the money is coming from “Big Pharma” or the government or other such boogeymen in order to allege some kind of conspiracy. Too bad they don’t hold all publications up to such lofty standards, or recognize conspiracy when it’s actually in their own backyard.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1N7M2Dd
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