Eric Weinstein: “If you screwed up covid this badly by getting inside of the Lancet and Nature. Peer review is this fake thing that supposedly stretches back to the founding of the Royal Society. And it’s very clear from the scholarship around it that it comes out of the period between 1965 and 1975 initiated by the Medicare Act, predicated on the need for editors for the journal expansion, founded by Pergamon Press and Robert Maxwell. By 1975 there’s a giant battle between the [National Science Foundation] NSF and both fiscal and cultural conservatives against something called “Man: A Course of Study” (MACOS), where peer review was born in a Utah clinic. [It] came out of the medical literature because the federal government in 1965 with The Medicare Act picked up the need to pay for so many medical procedures. They wanted to say “Why are we assigning this many medical procedures?” The doctors circled the wagons and said, “We will peer review each other.” Then in night, by 1975 the NSF was under the microscope, and they used peer review as a self defense of last resort to say we will be reviewing each other, right? Peer review is a myth.”

[Supp Sept 5, 2025]

An offering to those who aren’t hiding their religious faith in Science, Inc. and the peer review process.