Krumholz Channels Lindell et al
I'm in the prayers of a certain person who refuses to answer questions
Earlier this week, I wrote about a preprint on medRxiv which has as a co-author the head of the preprint server, Harlan Krumholz.
The whole situation was to me a chilling reminder of the Andrew Wakefield debacle in 1998 — authors poised to profit from spreading a “vaccine injury” narrative and getting a paper out into the media without initially disclosing their commercial interests.
In Wakefield’s case, he could have made millions from his fraudulent study’s findings, and it took a lot of digging to find that out. In this case, the authors were quicker to disclose, which was good. But by the time they did, the media had moved on. Was that purposeful? We’ll never know, but it wasn’t the best behavior.
Yesterday, Krumholz emailed me about the latest post. It was another interesting exchange.
At the time, I happened to be writing about a fraudulent preprint posted for commercial gain back in 2020, this one involving Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” guy, Covid-19, and oleander. I covered it at the time.
What was striking about the latest exchange with Krumholz is how it mirrored one back in 2020 between Lindell and Anderson Cooper of CNN.
During a live interview, Cooper accused Lindell of being a “snake oil salesman” and asked him, “How do you sleep at night?” Lindell responded, “You’re in my prayers,” and accused Cooper of “calling [him] names.”