Stupid paper #2: Spanish researchers discover the bleeding obvious, while failing to ask themselves some important questions

In last week’s post, I introduced you to a paper titled ‘Resistance to COVID-19 vaccination and the social contract: evidence from Italy‘, in which two highly educated US academics struggled to understand why a small proportion of Italians resisted the enormous economic and social pressure exerted by their government, to try to make them accept an experimental COVID-19 transfection agent. I compared this paper to the six reasons why Steve Patterson believes we have ended up in a dark age and found that it checked every box.

This week, I’m turning my attention to a study published online ahead of print, in late April 2023, in the journal Vaccine: X. What’s with the weird title of this journal – is this the X-Files of medical publishing? Sadly, the answer is not nearly that exciting. According to the journal’s Aims and Scope section:

“Vaccine: X is the open access companion journal of Vaccine and has the same aims and scope. The journal offers authors who want to publish in a gold open access journal the opportunity to make their work immediately and permanently accessible.

Vaccine: X publishes high quality science across all disciplines relevant to the field of vaccinology – all original article submissions across basic and clinical research, vaccine manufacturing, history, public policy, behavioral science and ethics, social sciences, safety, and many other related areas are welcomed.”

Oooh, a “gold open access journal” that “publishes high quality science”! Has that raised your expectations of this study? Before we dig into it though, let’s take a few minutes to reflect on the role that the development of the scientific method played in ending the last dark age.

Continue reading:

Academia and the new dark age: Part 3 – by Robyn Chuter (substack.com)