An Improved Peer-Review System to Compensate for Scientific Misconduct in Health-Sensitive Topics.

Abstract

In December 2021, one of the authors of the present paper (AR) took part in the peer review of the paper “Safety and immunogenicity of an inactivated virus particle vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, BIV1CovIran: findings from double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, phase I and II clinical trials among healthy adults” for the BMJ Open [1, 2]. The manuscript described clinical phases I and II of the COVID-19 vaccine BIV1-CovIran by Shifa Pharmed Industrial Group. The article was accepted for publication in March 2021 after three review rounds, with a total of six reviewers involved. On May 2022, AR received an email from Yeganeh Torbati, a Washington Post reporter who was investigating the development of BIV1-CovIran. Torbati asked AR for a general opinion about the data presented in the above article. AR replied that no serious anomalies were highlighted, although he specified that the peer review process was too superficial to guarantee complete integrity. Subsequently, through an article published in the Washington Post in August 2022, Torbati disclosed serious misconduct dynamics [3]. In support of her claims, an official correction was published in the BMJ Open in November 2022, in which the authors were forced to admit various conflicts of interest and the occurrence of vaccine-related adverse effects [1]. The relevant fact is that not even six peer reviewers and one editor have discovered such a hidden scenario. This is not intended to blame the journal or the reviewers but only to denounce that the world of scientific publication is currently subject to easy ethical violations. Although financial relationships can markedly bias biomedical research, marginal importance is given to this aspect [4, 5]. In this regard, this letter proposes a set of practices to counteract some major integrity problems.