The future of patient care is at stake when scientists are discouraged from challenging prevailing views, immunologist Robert Clancy, Ph.D., told medical commentator John Campbell, Ph.D.
“Who would want to go into medicine today?” Clancy asked during an interview last week. “It’s been so controlled, and the bureaucracy is suffocating.”
Clancy, an Australian medical researcher, author of more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, and University of Newcastle emeritus professor, said the pressure extends beyond COVID-19 studies. Medical journals sometimes reject work unrelated to COVID-19 if the researchers have a history of challenging the mainstream pandemic narrative.
“It’s not just that they’re blacklisting articles related to COVID. They’re blacklisting people who [were] foolish enough to write on these topics,” he said.
Clancy’s new book, “COVID and the Corruption of Medical Science: A Quadrant Chronicle,” examines what he sees as the pandemic response’s lasting damage to scientific independence.
The book collects 14 essays he previously published in Quadrant, an Australian literary, cultural and political journal. Clancy said he turned to the publication during COVID-19 because “it tells things as it is.” Other journals and media outlets “would not publish the data and the evidence and the truth,” he said.
Campbell agreed, saying some mainstream medical journals “have been infiltrated by … this dominant narrative that only one way of thinking is allowed. It’s quite an alarming situation,” he said.
Clancy added, “It’s happening … in a not-so-subtle way right across the medical profession.”
