Wednesday, 9 April 2025
Wanted - Fair critics of 'Promoting Vaccines in South Africa: Consensual or Non-Consensual Health Science Communication?'
Written for health science communication researchers concerned with genetic vaccination promotion being non-consensual and a form of propaganda.
Since June 2023, Dr Piers Robinson, myself and Dr David Bell have submitted the titular manuscript to nine journals with no strong reviews, and many desk rejects without solid explanation. This is despite our journal search from 2024 focusing on seemingly suitable journals that met the criteria of tackling (i) health communication, (ii) propaganda, and (iii) previously having shared controversial articles questioning the official COVID-19 narrative. Since we cannot identify any viable new targets, we have decided to share our manuscript as a pre-print on SSRN and ResearchGate. We hope that readers there can at least offer solid, constructive criticism of our work.
As scholars know, every journal submission can take many hours for preparing the related documentation, plus formatting the manuscript to a journal's stylistic specifications, etc. To compensate for such lengthy academic labour, authors might reasonably expect that editorial teams will be highly ethical in providing detailed reasoning behind desk-rejections. Where there is a strong pattern of such feedback being absent, or poor, on controversial topics, dissident authors may justifiably perceive that they are negotiating an academic journal publication firewall. Why would editors be reluctant to go on record for their reasons for desk-rejection, if they are indisputable? Even when editorial staff's feedback is highly critical, this is still constructive for authors. They can then completely revise their manuscript for submission to new journals. Or perhaps save time, by confronting the reality that their manuscript's non- or weak-contribution means it must be abandoned!
Our frustration with not receiving constructive criticism is similar to accounts from many other dissenters against the official COVID-19 narrative. Notably, Professors Bhattacharya and Hanke (2023) documented dissidents’ censorship experiences via popular pre-print options. And Professor Norman Fenton (in Fighting Goliath, 2024) and Dr Robert Malone (in PsyWar, 2024) provide compelling accounts of shifting from being welcome journal authors and conference speakers, to unpublishable for any manuscript critical of COVID-19 statistics or treatment policies. Such experts would seem unlikely to have produced fallacious research unsuited to peer review given their high levels of expertise, plus long publication records.
Our wannabe-journal article tackles an important, albeit controversial, question, How might pharma- or medical propaganda be distinguished from health communication? South Africa's (SA) case of COVID-19 genetic vaccine promotion is described for how incentivization, coercion and deceptive messaging approximated to a non-consensual approach- preventing informed consent for pregnant women. In terms of generalisability, this case study can be described as a hard case- given the status of pregnant women as perhaps the most vulnerable and protected category in society, one expects health communicators to be extremely cautious about adopting non-consensual methods of persuasion. We show that this was indeed the case in South Africa, making it more likely that such tactics were used for other less vulnerable groups.
In desk rejecting our work, editors and reviewers may well have thought that evaluating persuasive communication in terms of whether or not it is deceptive and non-consensual is not, in some sense, a legitimate research question. In stark contrast, as Dr Piers Robinson argues (at the end of this Linked thread), our research question is indeed, 'an essential part of evaluating whether any given persuasion campaign can be said to meet appropriate ethical/democratic standards. With the attention to fake news and disinformation, there is in fact much in the way of scholarly attention to questions of deceptive or manipulative communication. So we are not asking a question that is not asked by many others and across a wide range of issue areas. And we utilised a conceptual framework developed and published elsewhere.'
Another concern may be that our manuscript it "biased" to 'reach a predetermined outcome'. This ignores the possibility that our work could have found no evidence of deceptive communication, and none for incentivization. However, the evidence presented does strongly support a major concern that pregnant women were incentivised, deceived and coerced into taking (poorly-tested) genetic vaccines (whose side-effects are also poorly tracked). In the absence of detailed editor rejection feedback, it's hard for us to improve our argument for a hoped-for peer review that's fair.
It's also important to acknowledge the context in which our paper was written, which is of considerable scientific concern over the COVID-19 event. Notably, rushed guidance based on weak evidence from international health organisations could well have perpetuated negative health and other societal outcomes, rather than ameliorating them (Noakes, Bell & Noakes, 2022). In particular, health authorities rushed approval of genetic vaccines as the primary response, and their "health promotion" seems a ripe target for robust critique. Particularly when successful early treatments were widely reported to have been suppressed so that Emergency Use Authorisation for genetic vaccines could be granted (Kennedy, 2021).
An unworthy topic?
Our negative experience of repeated, poorly (or un-) explained rejections would seem to suggest that presenting South Africa's case of COVID-19 genetic vaccine promotion as pharmaceutical/medical propaganda was not worthy of academic journals' review- even for those promising to tackle scientific controversies and challenging topics.
Not unexpectedly, SSRN removed our pre-print after a week, providing the following email rationale: 'Given the need to be cautious about posting medical content, SSRN is selective on the papers we post. Your paper has not been accepted for posting on SSRN.' So, no critique of the paper's facts or methods, just rapid removal of our COVID 19 "health communication" critique. In SSRN 's defence, its website's FAQs do flag that 'Medical or health care preprints at SSRN are designed for the rapid, early dissemination of research findings; therefore, in most instances, we do not post reviews or opinion-led pieces, as well as editorials and perspectives.' So perhaps the latter concern was indeed the most significant factor in SSRN's decision... But with no explicit/specific explanation for its rationale for its decision, it's also possible that our critique of COVID-19 "health science communication" weighed more heavily as a factor by human decision makers. Alternately, an Artificial Intelligence agent wrote the rejection email, triggered by our sensitive keywords. COVID-19 + proganda = (a must reject routine.)
A history of a manuscript's rejection in one image
Figure 1. Nine journals that rejected 'Promoting Vaccines in South Africa' (2025)
Over two years, we also refined our manuscript to narrowly focus on 'non-consensual Health Science Communication', versus propaganda. While the latter is accurate, we recognised that it could be too contentious for some editors and reviewers, so revised the initial title. Our analysis was clearly bounded to describe the ways in which non-consensual persuasion tactics were employed in South Africa to promote uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines. There are several vulnerable categories (such as teenagers), and we decided to focus on pregnant women, or women wanting to be mothers. We explored the local incentives and coercive measures (both consensual and non-consensual) that were used in South Africa during the COVID-19 event. Our manuscript then critiqued deceptive messaging on the safety of the Pfizer BioNTech Comirnaty® vaccine in a Western Cape government flyer. We also contrasted the South Africa Health Products Regulatory Authority's vaccine safety monitoring and reporting of adverse events following immunisation (SAHPRA AEFI) infrormation, contrasting how it (does not) report on outcomes for women's health, versus the Vaccine Adverse Report System (VAERS SA). If there is a methodological flaw in this approach, we are open to suggestions on improving it.
That said, there are some changes that we would like an opportunity to argue against. For example, our title might be criticised for not addressing harms to "pregnant people". However, following such advice would distract from how genetic vaccines have proven especially damaging to biological females. Likewise, our definition of "health science communication" can be criticised as a narrow one, especially for South Africa's myriad of health contexts. While this is true and we should gloss this limitation, we must also prioritise what is core to focus on within a 10,000 word limit. Expanding our focus to include a broad view of science communication in SA would inevitably require the removal of evidence related to the Organised Persuasive Communication Framework's consensual versus non-consensual aspects. This would distract from our paper's core focus.
The inspiration for our original manuscript
The original paper was drafted for a special issue of the Transdisciplinary Research Journal of Southern Africa. It focuses on ‘Efficacy in health science communication in a post-pandemic age: Implications for Southern Africa’. In a small way, our review article was inspired as a critique of two assumptions in the call for the special issue's opening paragraph: (1) 'Much of the broad population and indeed more of the intelligentsia than one would imagine arguably remain to a greater or lesser degree sceptical of science' and (2) 'widespread suspicion of the origin of the virus seemingly fuelled by conspiracy theories, and of surprising levels of vaccine hesitancy voiced in a range of guises.'
In the first place, there is a different between science, and following The Science™ from a transglobal vaccine cartel. Individuals or groups did have sound scientific grounds to reject genetic vaccination. Indeed, individuals with PhDs were most likely to reject being "vaccinated" with a rushed and poorly-tested product. Secondly, the theory that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan lab is not a "conspiracy theory", but just one of four possible explanations {the others being zoonotic (animal-to-human) origins, a deliberate bio-weapon release, or a prior endemicity ‘discovered’ by an outbreak of testing}.
To flag the danger of assumptions, such as (1) and (2) being presented as "fact", our review originally sought to spotlight a major, but neglected, issue in the health communication field: what is pharmaceutical propaganda and how does it differ from health communication. Media studies and health communication scholars should be exercising hyper-reflexivity in considering how the communications they study typically emerge in an externally directed field. Their field's solutionist emphasis is often driven by powerful external groupings’ motives, such as national government departments or multinational pharmaceutical companies. Such actors can be incentivised to manipulate messaging for reasons other than the simple concern to protect the public's wellbeing during a perceived crisis or emergency.
Our reflexive article was originally rejected without explanation by one of the special issue’s editors. I have tweeted about how such behaviour is unacceptable, plus how AOSIS could update its policy to specify that an editor must provide explicit feedback on the reasons for desk rejection. This would meet COPE’s guideline that editors meet the needs of authors. Otherwise rejected authors might suspect that an AOSIS journal is not championing freedom of expression (and rather practicing scientific suppression) and is not precluding business needs (e.g. pharmaceutical support) from compromising intellectual standards. Tackling the danger of “successful” communications for dangerous pharmaceutical interventions as pharmaceutical propaganda is important, particularly given the rise of health authoritarianism during a “pandemic”.
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