Sadly it's too hard to attribute the deaths via vaccine hesitancy that this paper will cause, so none of the reviewers can get charged with involuntary manslaughter.
I'm an academic mathematician. Your pointing out the name of the journal is an interesting point.
Pop quiz: out of the journals Aequationes mathematicae, Indagationes mathematicae, Inventiones mathematicae, Quaestiones mathematicae, three are mediocre and one is absolutely top-notch. Without googling can you guess which?
MDPI is a publisher that was started recently, has apparently tried to grow very fast, and engages in questionable practices. I peer-reviewed for one of their journals once and had a very negative experience. Never. Again.
They've also started journals with good sounding names. For example there was no mathematics journal with the title "Mathematics" so they started one.
I've instructed my mail client that *@mdpi.com is to go straight to spam. I got invited to be on the editorial board of one of their journals, and I felt no guilt about not responding. Not too surprised to see them publish crackpottery.
My own field is political communication. One of our leading journals is 'Political Communication', which could exemplify any of the above. But another is 'The International Journal of Press/Politics', which should by its name be complete shit and turns out to be excellent.
Certainly this debacle should lower their rating to "low repute journal".
Is the good one Indagationes ?
(Edit: looks likely. I picked it because it seemed the better name)
Yeah, that's the only one whose meaning you can't guess if you don't read Latin. Inventiones, as it turns out.
Seems the Italians kept it around in the original spelling, too.
P.S. Hey, it's English, just barely: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indagate
I also made the mistake of reviewing for them once. It was a very easy review, as the paper (also mathematics) was absolute crap, and I said as much. It was published anyway, and now I'm definitely on a list. My spam box slowly accumulates more and more MDPI emails.
We don't want to contribute to vaccine hesitancy, but we also don't want to adopt a totalitarian worldview where any deviation from "yay vaccines!" is tantamount to murder.
Science should be a process where eventually truth wins out. For this to happen scientists need to be able to publish their findings without fear of retribution. They already risk losing funding, they already have poor job security, they already need to meet a quota for papers and citations. Adding more negative incentives on top of this won't do society any good.
The one highly-enthusiastic reviewer is a bit suspicious, but I'd more suspect it was a case of the author recommending a friend as a reviewer (a common practice). But it could also just be by luck they got a person who was negative towards covid vaccinations so wanted to be very supportive.
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/vaccines/instructions
"Reviewer Suggestions
During the submission process, please suggest three potential reviewers with the appropriate expertise to review the manuscript. The editors will not necessarily approach these referees. Please provide detailed contact information (address, homepage, phone, e-mail address). The proposed referees should neither be current collaborators of the co-authors nor have published with any of the co-authors of the manuscript within the last five years. Proposed reviewers should be from different institutions to the authors. You may identify appropriate Editorial Board members of the journal as potential reviewers. You may suggest reviewers from among the authors that you frequently cite in your paper."
Obviously people are supposed to do so ethically, but cabals of friends can potentially hack the process by suggesting each other and working together.
Referees are normally anonymous. But once they start advising to insert some references to some obscure and/or irrelevant articles...
Further, your characterisation of the article as a mere "deviation" is grossly inaccurate: their text is not a honest look at vaccine dangers but rather it maliciously picks data to get the worst result misuse can produce. The only thing they shy away from is outright fabrication.
I recommend you get acquainted with the definition of manslaughter, otherwise you wouldn't complain or object to it after learning the basics of this particular paper and how it's broken logic is being abused as a denialist propaganda tool.
For future reference, here's Cambridge Dictionary's definition of manslaughter:
> the crime of killing a person when the killer did not intend to do it or cannot be responsible for his or her actions:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/manslaug...