Science publishing at its worst: Toxicology Reports is suffering from journal-level fraud. It is promoting COVID click-bait articles, authored by the editor-in-chief, without reasonable independent peer review.
My rundown:
blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2021/09/30/…
/1 Initially I thought this was an article-level problem – an anti-vax polemic by the author, Ronald Kostoff, that had somehow slipped through review by using the language and format of sincere research.

https://twitter.com/metasj/status/1441559190556708867

In this edition of #scifraud: Ronald Kostoff, an octogenarian generalist w/ a 1000-meter stare, has a fraudulent article in the latest _Toxicology Reports_ claiming Covid vaccines kill 5x more people than they save.

How could @ElsevierConnect publish such deadly nonsense? /1 @ElsevierConnect Here's the article, full of scare quotes, conspiracy buzzwords, and bad data.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

How did this pass peer review? Journal editor @aristsatsakis surely knows better. But this fraud is already the most-talked about article Toxicol.Rep. has published all year. /2

Harald Walach, a German parapsychologist, has published two high-impact peer-reviewed papers exaggerating the risks of COVID vaccines & of wearing masks. Very dangerous.

Closed, one-pass #peerreview fails at modern scales of paper production & disinformation propagation. /1 The first paper, discouraging vaccinations, was published in _Vaccines_.

It was retracted, five editors resigned, and Walach's university ended his appointment for potentially 'lead[ing] to public harm', but not before the paper got 500,000 views.
bmj.com/content/374/bm…
/2