RE: Do I? Cudgel you with peer-reviewed studies?

Posted on: August 28, 2025 at 17:51:22 CT

Findings
Study participants reported being subject to a wide variety of censorship and suppression tactics used against them by both the medical establishment and the media, due to their critical and unorthodox positions on COVID-19. They also described the counter-tactics they used to resist. We divide the findings into two sections, the first describing censorship and suppression tactics and the second describing the counter-tactics used by our participants.

Silencing Dissent: Censoring and Suppressing Tactics
Tactics of censorship and suppression described by our respondents include exclusion, derogatory labelling, hostile comments and threatening statements by the media, both mainstream and social; dismissal by the respondents’ employers; official inquiries; revocation of medical licenses; lawsuits; and retraction of scientific papers after publication.

Exclusion
Respondents reported how, at a very early stage of the epidemic, when they just began to express criticism or their different position, they were surprised to discover that the mainstream media, which until then had seen them as desirable interviewees, stopped interviewing them and accepting opinion pieces from them:

Neither X nor Y [two central newspapers in the respondent's country] wanted to publish my articles. Without a proper explanation. Just stopped receiving articles. It was quite blatant, that they stopped accepting articles expressing a different opinion from that of the ministry of health (MOH). The number of journalists who can really be talked to, who are willing to listen to another opinion, to publish, has been greatly reduced, and most health reporters today are very biased towards the MOH (#10).

Denigration
Respondents reported that exclusion was only the first step: shortly after that they started being subjected to defamation by the media, and disparaged as “anti-vaxxers,” “Covid deniers,” “dis/misinformation spreaders” and/or “conspiracy theorists”:

After that report came out…, I was front page of the Sunday Times… it said… X [the respondent name], a professor in A [the institution this respondent works in] is co-author of anti vax report… I was now, yeah…, I was told I was anti-vaccine (#9).

I have been vilified.… I’ve been called a quack…, an anti-vaxxer and a COVID denier, a conspiracy theorist (#13).

Recruiting “Third Parties” to Assist in Discrediting
One prominent tactic our respondents claim was used by the media to discredit them was the use of seemingly independent “third party sources,” such as other doctors, to undermine them, for example by writing defamatory articles:

I was shocked at what came out the next day in The Wall Street Journal… So here we had three of the most senior doctors with hundreds and hundreds of publications and scientific credibility to our resumes and …a major media outlet allowed a junior doctor to publish who has no academic standing or track record…[and] have him publish a defamatory piece (#6).

Another “third party” source used by the media, according to our respondents, was “fact-checking” organizations, a practice that is ostensibly meant to verify published information to promote the veracity of reporting. However, some respondents alleged that the fact-checking groups were recruited and operated by corporate or other stakeholders to discredit them and try to discredit the information they presented:

…the fact checkers are a source of misinformation, so though it may review something and say, Dr. X said something, but… they make a counterclaim. The counter claims are never cited in the data… they all trace back to the vaccine manufacturers or the vaccine stakeholders (#6).

you get the fact checkers… They tried to discredit S, but also, because I was a co-author, they were picking on me…, and all this sort of stuff and… discredit by association... (#4).

As seen in the second example above, some of the participants said that those “fact-checking” groups were used to discredit and defame not only the researcher or doctor who presented a contrarian opinion or information, but also others who were associated with them.

Some respondents said that the media persecuted them to the point of blackening their name at their workplace, resulting in their dismissal, or that they were forced to resign:

I lost my job..., I was working for the last 20 years in X [the institution’s name]… And so, the media started coming to X… there was a concerted effort to… ruin my reputation, even though, this is unbelievable, they had the lowest death rate basically in the world, and the doctor who brought it to them, gets vilified and slandered. So, I left on my own… My reputation was slandered. I mean the level of treatment that I didn’t expect and abuse I would say (#1).

Online Censorship
Some respondents reported being censored on social media networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Google, LinkedIn), and said some of their posts, tweets, videos or even accounts were taken down by the networks.

My YouTube videos were being taken down. Facebook put me in jail, “Facebook Jail.” And I found that I was being de-platformed everywhere (#1).

I’ve always had videos, just my teaching material I’ve been putting up on YouTube…, but I also started to put up materials around this just sort of talking through some of the research… looking at the vaccine efficacy data... YouTube started taking it down. And so now …, I cannot post, I can’t even mention vaccines, because within seconds, as soon as I’m actually trying to upload the video, YouTube will say this video goes against our guidelines... (#3).

I got terminated from TikTok… All of a sudden, I was permanently banned because presumably I had a community violation (#2).

I’m currently on my sixth twitter account…the last one was shut down supposedly for a tweet about X’s lab [the name of the lab], but it was coming. I ruffled too many feathers (#2).

As can be seen in the above examples, respondents noted that the removal of their materials from social networks was accompanied by a notice claiming they had violated the “community rules.” They emphasized that these were academic materials, backed up scientifically:

I became aware that an academic YouTube video that I had put together regarding the paper in the XXX journal … was pulled down by YouTube, and I received a notice that it had violated terms of the YouTube community… without ever having any terms of use from YouTube that would explain what types of terms would be applied to a four PowerPoint slide scientific video…(#6).

One of the respondents reported on censorship even in Google Docs, which means that even private communications are being censored:

Google Docs started restricting and censoring my ability to share documents… This is not Twitter throwing me off like they did. This is an organization telling me that I cannot send a private communication to a colleague or to a friend, or to a family member... (#1).

Censorship and Suppression by the Medical and Academic Establishment
Some of the respondents reported that they were subjected to defamation by their own institution, with the apparent intention to harm their reputation and careers. For example:

…in [my country], we have approximately 55,000 physicians. My name appeared on the official website of the Ministry of Health, that I’m the only person, one medical doctor who is… distributing disinformation... (#12).

There was a concerted effort to… ruin my reputation even though, this is unbelievable, they [the hospital where I work] had the lowest death rate basically in the world (#1).

Some participants also said that they had received a clear message from the institution where they worked that they were not allowed to identify themselves with the institution when giving an interview or a testimony or expressing their views—in some cases as a condition of renewing their contract.

I gave X (a certain treatment) testimony, and that kind of went viral. And the hospital was not happy because my affiliation had shown up… They offered me a new contract. They said …, we got some new terms for you, because my old contract was not restricted. The new one basically had like seven or eight restrictions of my first amendment rights… basically I couldn’t talk to the press, I couldn’t speak in public…, unless I said, these are my opinions not that of my employer... It was a relatively short conversation. I said that’s never going to happen, I’m never going to sign that thing, and we said goodbye (#9).

In some cases, respondents reported that following a position or criticism they expressed, they were dismissed from their institution, or were notified that their contract would not be renewed.

I was told that my contract [at the medical clinic] wasn’t going to be renewed… There’s a whole variety of checklists for the contract not to be renewed, there must be a due process, and the first red flag is that there was no due process. I asked specifically was there a board vote…, and the answer was no, and I said… why is this action being taken, and their response was “no reason”… [Later] I received a letter from [X] University saying that I was stripped of my professorship, with no due process, with no faculty senate, nothing…. Then, I received a…letter from [Y] University, again no due process, no faculty senate, no explanation (#6).

Similarly, respondents said they were summarily dismissed or disqualified from prestigious positions, such as serving on leading health or scientific committees, or editing medical journals, without due process or transparency:

… the director general of the Ministry of [X] approached me ... and said that the Minister had reached an agreement with the Ministry of Health, that he was putting a representative on the [prescription drug] basket committee ..., and she said all fingers had pointed to me... Then comes a phone call after a week, and she says, “listen, your name was already passed on as a request of the Minister to the Basket Committee, and has been disqualified unequivocally because you oppose [COVID] vaccinations in children”… I was shocked… Until then the responses I received were from the bottom. This is a response from the top (#11).

…there was a whole series of actions taken again with no due process and no explanation so… I received a notice from the [medical association] that I was being stripped from a committee position… I received a letter from a journal…where I was the editor in chief, being stripped of the editorship, again with no due process, no phone calls no, tractable explanation… I received a letter from the National Institutes of Health being stripped from a longstanding committee position, I was on the committee for several decades and was stripped off of that, again no phone call, no due process, no explanation (#6).

In one case, the respondent had learned that his country’s parallel to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) intervened and asked the university to “examine” his “case”:

…my university president invited me to talk about “corona”. In that meeting, I was informed… that the [The equivalent health authority to the CDC in the interviewees' country] had written a letter to the president, asking him to examine my case because, according to the ministerial letter, I was going public with methodologically questionable things. According to the president, the university has never received similar requests before… (#12).

Some of the interviewees said that the health establishment had not only blackened their reputation and taken serious measures against them but also cooperated with the media and made sure to spread the information about those measures through them:

You know the news release came out, I’m a prominent physician in the United States, so, in fact, I believe the health system drafted a press release that went out, that they were suing me, and so the topic came up [during the press interview], “so are you being sued, and… what’s your reaction?” (#6).

Official Inquiries
Some doctors reported on official inquiries launched against them, such as investigating or threatening to withdraw their medical license:

…my license was investigated... At that point in time, I felt that the medical board was being weaponized… My license ended up getting investigated… three times now, each time… without any punishment or reprimand or anything... But it merely points to the fact that it’s very easy to get censored or cancelled (#2).

Following a post I wrote about the adverse events ... I received a letter from the Committee of X [the name of the committee]. Allegedly they asked me for the details of these patients (the patients the interviewee reported in his post had adverse events), but if it was genuinely a real wish on their part, then it was not this committee, which in fact deals with Y [the definition of the committee's activities] that would have asked me for the details, but a real official from the Ministry of Health. I answered them through A [my lawyer], a more legal and less medical reply. This is basically a committee without powers. I do not think I am even allowed to pass on the names of patients to them. It can be given to a relevant party, a district doctor… I will be happy to talk to them (#2).

One of the respondents reports that a million-dollar lawsuit was filed against him:

And then my wife calls me and says that the health system is suing us for over a million dollars, so I have just put together teams of attorneys and scrambled them into court... And … the charge is that is that I’m violating terms of my separation agreement, specifically that the health system is being brought into my media presentations, and I’ve never made any [such] statements (#6).

Another respondent reports on a police search conducted at his private clinic in his home:

The [medical board] showed up unexpectedly one day without a warrant to search my house, which was listed in their records as my office, to do a medical office inspection, which doesn’t require a warrant [in my country]. I told them it’s my business office and I don’t see patients there and they have no business coming in there (#7).

Retraction of Scientific Papers
Some researchers and doctors recounted how their research had been retracted by the journal after publication:

And then, five days before the FDA pediatric meeting on vaccination, [the publishing company] pulls the paper out of the National Library of Medicine and says that they are retracting it. And the explanation, they tell us a few days later, is that they think they didn’t invite the paper to begin with. And I can tell you as an editor, the paper was clearly welcomed, and it went through the standard peer review process. The only way they can legally pull a paper out of the National Library of Medicine is if it’s scientifically invalid, and that wasn’t the claim (#6).

So I submitted it to X [the name of the journal] … and well, this was a desk rejection … Actually, at least for me the arguments were kind of, say, from my perspective, there were no solid arguments… I don't know why this was rejected, and then I submitted it to several other channels... and then I stopped to trying to publish it in the scientific literature. It's published as a pre-print (#8).

Another theme that arose repeatedly during the interviews was that research critical of COVID-19 policies and orthodoxy were treated in ways the interviewees had never encountered before in their careers. This included having papers rejected from journals (often multiple times) without peer review, the journal review and publication process taking many months longer than typical for the journal, and even having papers rejected from pre-print servers such as MedRXiv:

At the beginning of the pandemic, we were getting a lot of stuff published. It wasn’t in any way challenging the orthodox narrative… and then we did this analysis on [X] and then when that happened, oh my God they went ballistic, we got attacked. That work never got published. This is where the censorship—we’d already had some problems because we were publishing other work on the case data, and it was being automatically rejected from any of the medical journals, anything like that. And that was when our stuff started to get rejected from arXiv and medRxiv…the only place we could get any of this stuff published, was we just put it on ResearchGate (#4).

In one case, an interviewee said he felt so threatened by the medical establishment that he refrained from putting his name on papers he co-authored with other researchers, and that those whose names do appear on the papers were trying to hide or stay under the radar until the paper was published:

We’ve got a paper that’s ready to come out in [an important journal], and the group that published it has been hiding for a year... Now, I can’t be on the paper you know (#5).