Follow the science? Academic fraud can kill

Follow the science? Academic fraud can kill

There were three reasons why I was a climate skeptic. The first was that the main supporters were those on the left who wanted more power to control people’s lives. I would not ever vote for. Any of those advocates. The second was that I did not believe the models. After modeling economic hypotheses all my professional life I knew intimately the limitations of formulating mathematical equations to mimic real economic phenomena. The third and most important was that I knew that empirical scientists lied. They fudged their models, changed the signs on the parameters if they did not conform to expectations and manipulated the results. I mentioned that when I was in graduate school that my advisor, the great Karl Brunner, edited the Journal of Money, Banking and Credit. One year he announced that all accepted papers prior to publication had to have their results independently verified. Submissions fell dramatically and papers already in review were withdrawn.

This, sadly, was no isolated incidence. Here is what I wrote in the Knoxville Focus, November 20, 2023: “There is a large scientific literature – mostly suppressed – that finds that the world is not in imminent danger from changes in the climate. Many prominent scientific journals will not publish these studies and many funding sources will not fund research contrary to the climate change narrative. Since researchers are driven to publish for success and to acquire funding, they are motivated to cheat and falsify their findings in order to achieve the “correct” results. It has been reported elsewhere that over 60 of published empirical results may be compromised.  These falsifications are not merely of young assistant professors struggling to publish in the top journals to achieve tenure and promotion. It is also the most eminent scientists in the country. The climate director at Berkeley altered results in order to get a paper published. The president of Stanford recently resigned accused of falsifying data. Plagiarism has always been rife within academics (as well as politics, see Joe Biden).”

“There is a large scientific literature – mostly suppressed – that finds that the world is not in imminent danger from changes in the climate. Many prominent scientific journals will not publish these studies and many funding sources will not fund research contrary to the climate change narrative. Since researchers are driven to publish for success and to acquire funding, they are motivated to cheat and falsify their findings in order to achieve the “correct” results.” So within the “settled science” of studies on the climate, don’t be shocked if many – if not most – fail the smell test.

There is actually a website called Retraction Watch that documents academic fraud. https://retractionwatch.com

Last year it identified a record 13,000 retracted academic papers – articles that had been published (in many cases having first gone through peer review) but were subsequently proven wrong and withdrawn from circulation. The entire

catalogue of Retraction Watch has swelled to over 50,000 entries. “Our database is updated every day,” says Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch’s co-founder, “Usually with about 40 new retractions daily.” One scientist said “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.” It is commonly reported that 60 percent of all academic papers may have fraudulent findings.

So spending trillions and trillions of dollars on what turns out to be truly a big green scam is bad enough.  But the fraud in medical research is not only shocking but is criminal and has cost lives. An article in Reason entitled “How a Scientific Cartel Protects Fraudsters and Rakes in Billions of Taxpayer Dollars” says “Corrupt scientists rarely face accountability. The real victims are everyone

else.” https://reason.com/2026/05/06/how-a-scientific-cartel-protects-fraudsters-and-rakes-in-billions-of-taxpayer-dollars/

The author describes in heartbreaking detail the slide of his grandmother into Alzheimers. He then describes the following:

“Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, published a paper in Nature in 2006 claiming to identify a specific amyloid beta protein assembly as the direct cause of memory impairment in Alzheimer’s. This reinvigorated the amyloid hypothesis at a moment when skepticism about it was ramping up. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) devoted $1.6 billion to projects that mention amyloids in 2022 alone, nearly half of all federal Alzheimer’s funding that year.  Lesné was a star.

But there were rumblings. Numerous amyloid drugs made it to trials with billions invested by pharmaceutical companies. They failed repeatedly. A question arose in the pharmaceutical community: How can this be right? How can the trials keep failing if the underlying research is correct? In 2022, the Vanderbilt neuroscientist Matthew Schrag uncovered evidence that images in Lesné’s paper had been manipulated. Science magazine found more than 20 suspect papers by Lesné, with over 70 instances of possible image tampering. Nature retracted the paper in June 2024. Every author except Lesné signed the retraction. Lesné himself resigned from his tenured position at the University of Minnesota on March 1, 2025, three years after his fraud was exposed.

Lesné resigned, but was still rich. None of his grant money was clawed back.”

“The victims of corrupt science and siloed information never know they were harmed. The child who dies because her cure was delayed by a few years never knows the hurt that she received. The researchers who didn’t get the grant for their novel idea because the cartel (here the National Institutes of Health) was funding their buddies on the backs of fraudulent graphs never knew they got screwed.”

“Science must be a free market of ideas, but now it’s a cartel. NIH grant funding is centrally planned science. A small committee directs billions, yet is structurally incapable of knowing which directions are most promising.”

BTW, the author uses a pseudonym “Seconds”, likely a scientist seeking to protect himself within the academy and to continue to receive grants from the cartel that he so rightly criticizes. Antony Fauci repeatedly said “follow the science.” Well I don’t believe the science until proven otherwise. Al Gore’s “settled science” is based on lies, misrepresentations and outright fraud.

What can be done? The government has the power to fine violators up to  $10,000 a day but has done nothing. This is only for government grants. The government should verify each funded research. If fraud is found, the grant monies should be returned and the researcher should be fined, banned for life or in the case of medical fraud be put in jail. What of all the fraud in academia that is not funded by the federal government? I suggest that what Karl Brunner did those long years ago at Ohio State become the norm. All papers must be independently verified prior to publication. Period. If that happens then maybe even I might believe some of the results.