Is information on Covid and the covid vaccine on Substack as good as information in peer-reviewed medical journals?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: fuck no.
I am no longer puzzled at the misinformation posted here by conspiracy theorists.
After reading posts and links for several months and viewing the linked videos, and after some hours of my life researching and composing specific responses, I reached the conclusions that these folk are:
- Impervious to critical thinking
- Cannot acknowledge any instance in which they get it wrong
- Thinking in a way which does not reflect new information
Any covid information posted on Substack is very likely to be wrong, slanted, or incomplete. Authors of covid, vaccine, and conspiracy who post on Substack have the habit of lacking the specific expertise in the very area in which they are writing, and apparently cannot get published in other venues.
Some aspects of what the covid conspiracy theorists write are correct and warrant further investigation. However, that is true of every medical invention.
The pattern to the misinformation which I see in the covid/vaccine/conspiracy postings are taking isolated facts out of context, and then misinterpreting them. Repeatedly. This misinformation is then taken as the basis of constructing yet more erroneous interpretations. This is now a matter of belief and cherry-picking to support that belief; none of this is logical, reasonable, or able to withstand informed scrutiny.
An example of self-published misinformation which some conspiracy theorists here advocated was “peer-reviewed” and therefore legitimate was a self-published Substack journal article. In this article, the research’s numerous and fatal errors were pointed out in the comments section. It was suggested that these comments were “peer-reviews” and therefore the article was scientifically acceptable. (WTF?!?) The reviews were not all by peers, and they all effectively refuted the article. The “peers” wrote that the article was wrong. Posts 2692, 2782, etc.
Substack is a profit-making platform for self-published authors: a vanity press. As such, it has the capacity for legitimate uses in which the authors actually publish in their area of expertise, and with enough precision, accuracy, and completeness of data to be evaluated. So far, in all the Substack covid/vaccine/conspiracy links posted here, I have not yet run across a well-researched and well-written article. These authors do harm to the public with their crap.
Substack - Wikipedia - especially pertinent are the criticism and finance sections.