Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, preprint servers such as the Social Science Research Network and medRxiv came to serve an important role in disseminating timely information from the labs of some of the world’s leading epidemiologists, infectious disease experts, and other researchers that would ordinarily take months to work through the standard peer review process.

Undoubtedly, there were trade-offs. Work published through a preprint server is probably best considered a working draft, a little more tentative and a little less sanitized than it would be upon publication in peer-reviewed form. Yet, the nature of preprint servers also offered scholars, the media, and interested members of the public the latest information pertaining to COVID research in as close to real time as one could hope while permitting researchers a public forum to refine their ideas.

Or at least that was the ideal. In recent months, however, prominent critics of COVID policy have come forward with accusations of censorship against SSRN and medRxiv, which they claim unfairly rejected or removed articles critical of government policies regarding COVID and its mitigation, as well as the agencies responsible for putting forth said policies.

University of California, San Francisco, physician-epidemiologist Vinay Prasad and UCSF epidemiologist and biostatistician Alyson Haslam wrote in a July preprint article, “These servers appear to have a more stringent vetting process for articles on COVID topics, but because of the novelty of the virus, there are fewer absolutes about what is known, suggesting that a free exchange of scientific information is being stifled.”

On his Substack, Prasad also alleged , “Preprint servers appear to be playing politics.”

“Preprint servers are being used to censor views critical of the CDC, and policy errors made by the Democratic administration,” he added. “If only papers that praise the CDC are acceptable by preprint servers, than [sic] the role of science as a check and balance on incorrect policy is subverted.”

Stanford physician-epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya and Johns Hopkins economist Steve H. Hanke in an article for Econ Journal Watch this September expressed similar sentiments as they reported several instances in which they and others were purportedly censored by the preprint severs for COVID wrongthink. They suggested such actions reflect darker trends within our society.

Drawing on the work of Austrian-born political philosopher Friedrich Hayek , the scholars posed the question, “Has covid brought an end to truth?”

They suggested censorship by the preprint servers may be indicative of a recent drift in Western society toward totalitarianism.

What the censorship of dissenting scientific voices by preprint servers ultimately means for science or society as a whole remains to be seen, but at the very least, it most certainly would appear to be incongruent with what became one of their main functions during the pandemic, which was facilitating the timely exchange of scientific information, even if imperfect.

Moreover, if Prasad, Bhattacharya, and Hanke are right, censorship by preprint servers would seem to be a symptom of a larger system aimed at preventing the spread of information incongruent with narratives favored by those in power.

Daniel Nuccio is a Ph.D. student in biology and a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute.