“As Editor-in-Chief of Science, Public Health Policy & the Law, I have established rigorous review practices and policies. To date we have published papers by invitation only. The peer-review process is as unbiased as possible: the authors of a paper do not know who the reviewers are, and we do not allow conflicts of interest between authors and reviewers. Unlike other journals, we consider submissions that may have been wrongfully retracted. The reviewers are made aware that the paper has been sent to the journal following retraction, and why the journal is reviewing the study or paper anew. The decision to publish or not publish the paper is entirely dependent on the feedback we receive from the peer reviewers. The study by Mark Skidmore et al. that was published earlier this month survived peer review. The reviewers gave substantiative feedback, and the authors addressed their critiques. Fair enough. Now the paper is part of the living, published knowledge base, not lying in ashes like so many Nazi-burned books. After publication of our substack announcing Dr. Skidmore’s exoneration by the MSU IRB, naturally, and predictably, a person named David Gorski had to try to spin the events into a narrative he always spins: that vaccine are always safe, that the IRB got it wrong, that Science, Public Health Policy & the Law is an “antivax” “fake” journal, all the usual vacuous and empirically impoverished ad hominem he could muster.
All that empirically empty noise aside, let’s look at his critique: