On its face, peer review should be a good thing. It is meant to prevent misleading or false information in respected publications.
 
Peer reviewers are thought to be unbiased experts on the topic of an article.

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WHY PEER REVIEWERS NEED TO BE REVIEWED
They:

• May be selected or rejected by the authors they review

 

• May not be qualified

 

• May be biased or ideologically driven

 

• May have an economic, emotional, or belief-driven reason to approve or reject an author's work

 

• May be selected in haste to meet publication deadlines

 

• May be chosen to please advertisers or benefactors

 

• May be a friend of an author, editor, or related business

 

• May (usually are) be of unknown identity to readers

 

• May wave through ghost-written papers signed by prominent academics

 

• Have no accountability

 

• May receive money from industries that have a vested interest

 

• Block attempts to challenge the prevailing mainstream consensus view

 
 
MONEY AND PEER REVIEW
Money drives almost everything today. During a 3-year period, reviewers for the four most prominent medical journals (The BMJ, JAMA, The Lancet, and NEJM) received over one billion dollars. These were direct payments to reviewers, their institutions, or for research grants. 

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THE PEER-REVIEW RECORD
Medical journals have published thousands of fake scientific papers.
 
It can take years (or never) before false conclusions of peer-reviewed studies are exposed and retracted. Unfortunately, these studies linger in the medical standard of care and influence public policy, medical procedures, the use of drugs, diagnoses, and clinical testing.
 
As documented in works such as Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma and Peter Gøtzsche’s Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime, along with findings from regulatory agencies and epidemiological studies, several widely used medical treatments have later been associated with serious harms, including:
 
1. Hormone Replacement Therapy, resulting in heart disease, stroke, cancer, dementia, etc.
 
2. Vioxx, resulting in heart attack, stroke, etc.
 
3. Diethylstilbestrol, resulting in vaginal cancers, reproductive tract malformations, and infertility in daughters exposed in utero.
 
4. OxyContin, resulting in addiction and overdose deaths.
 
5. Thalidomide, resulting in severe birth defects.
 
6. Hydroxyethyl Starch in IV fluid, resulting in kidney failure and increased mortality.
 
7. COVID-19 interventions--reviewers promoted lockdowns, school closures, business closures, mass vaccination, and journal articles claiming the safety and effectiveness of the medical measures taken. In sworn testimony before the U.S. Senate and Congress, Dr. Peter McCullough (MD, MPH), a widely published cardiologist with over 700 citations in the National Library of Medicine, raised concerns that vaccine safety trials published in peer-reviewed journals did not include adequate long-term placebo-controlled studies.
 
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now acknowledges a causal association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis/pericarditis, particularly in adolescent and young adult males, typically occurring within about seven days of the second dose.
 
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved updated labeling for the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines to reflect these risks.
 
Homeland Security and governmental affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released its findings on "The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: How Health Officials Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Associated with the COVID-19 Vaccines"
 
These examples, and particularly the ongoing COVID-19 one we have all been living through for the past five years, remind us that even treatments promoted as breakthroughs and life-saving can carry unforeseen risks. This underscores the importance of transparency, independent investigation, and true informed consent.
 
 
PEER REVIEW LIMITS INFORMATION
Unknown and unaccountable peer reviewers have been given power over what journal readers are allowed to see and consider. The information they permit is used by corporations, scientists, medical personnel, government, media, and the public to guide life and death decisions.
 
By so doing, editors, peer reviewers, and journal owners may be perceived as limiting open discussion, which some interpret as a restriction on academic freedom, scientific debate, or free speech.
 
Of course, this doesn't mean a journal must publish anything that comes to it. It does mean it must be held responsible for the selection of articles and for the harms resulting from them if the publication gives the impression that their peer review process yields truth.
 
 
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
It's argued that peer review, despite its failings, is the best we have to access truth. What it does most effectively, however, is create confidence, belief, and dependence, which are anti-truth. Rather than sources of unbiased truth, peer-reviewed journals often just reflect groupthink.

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Our best access to truth begins with personal responsibility. Everyone has the obligation to engage reason, free will, and conscience to be their own peer reviewer of information. A mind free of beliefs and blind trust with access to an open arena of competing ideas and information is the only thing that makes knowing and safety possible.