What is going on at JAMA Network Open?
Why did the editor, a COVID fanatic, lock down his account.
Recently Manni, a thoughtful researcher tweeted this story of editorial malpractice.
Just to be clear, it is just poor practice to waste authors time like this. If the journal didn’t want the article, they should have just said so.
Personally, I have published 20+ articles in JAMA network open under the prior editor in chief, Fred Rivera, and didn’t have any issues with the journal overall. Then something happened. They picked a new editor.
The name struck me as familiar. During the pandemic, Dr. Perencevich was often in my mentions. But strangely I couldn’t read his tweets anymore because he had locked his account.
Why would he do that?
I started to google, and I found several users had screenshotted his prior posts, which were overall, unhinged and deranged. Here was one e.g. about sending his kids to class.
This is was in response to one of my articles arguing that shaming and demonizing people who didn’t want to wear masks or get vaccines is not consistent with public health. Not only ineffective but counter to the spirt of public health. Not to mention, community masking is useless. This is what Dr. P wrote
Sadly, mask laws were ineffective. Eli spent more time wondering how to ‘enforce’ them than he did wondering what the evidence was to support them.
This was another gem of his. Of course, he was not right. Not at all.
Here he discussed his public health strategy of whether to send vaccines to states experiencing surges in cases.
Pretty much the worst public health idea would be to only send vaccines if governors closed schools. That harms both the old and young.
Here again, less carrot more stick.
College kids had little to worry about from COVID, especially in March 2021 (post vax).
One more (at least he knew cloth masks were useless— as far as I know, no US location mandated surgical or N95 masks (all permitted cloths to sate mandates) ergo, this conflicts with his prior enforcement of mask mandates.
The people who got the pandemic totally wrong— Jha, Murthy, Marks, Califf, Walensky, Fauci and, sadly Eli Perencevich, have been rewarded with talks, lifetime achievement awards and editorships.
Sadly, this just further signals the decline of merit in American medicine. Politically aligned poor thinking gets rewarded.
Sigh…that morning sometime in the last 5 years when you wake-up and realize, without a doubt, that most of the “grown-ups,” “experts,” and leaders are some combination of idiotic, lazy, or corrupted; and worse, that the system filters for these traits, and not for capable fiduciaries.
The solution to Dr. Perencevich as a biased editor for JAMA open network is don’t submit papers to them. That might get their attention. Thanks for the info.