This article tells the story of one of the most disturbing breaches of scientific ethics we’ve encountered in our academic careers—buried in the peer-review process of one of the world’s leading vaccination journals, in the midst of a global health crisis.

Our story begins, as many things in science do, with a question. A provocative study published in Vaccine—a highly influential medical journal—asked: “Are intelligent people more likely to get vaccinated?” The study, conducted by Zur and colleagues (2023), examined soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during the Covid-19 pandemic and concluded that “higher intelligence was the strongest predictor for vaccine adherence.”1

We read the study with growing unease. The conceptual leap was striking, the methodological choices questionable, and the ethical implications deeply troubling—especially given the context. These were not civilians making autonomous medical decisions in ordinary times. These were young conscripts operating within a rigid military hierarchy, subjected to intense social and institutional pressure to vaccinate during a historical moment when a strict Covid-19 vaccine passport policy was in force (i.e., the Israeli ‘green pass’). …

The authors of the original study—the very people we had critiqued—had been assigned to review our letter anonymously. They evaluated our critique of their own work and recommended its rejection. In their public comments, they even referred to themselves in the third person, as though they were neutral reviewers. At one point, they wrote that they “understand [that] a corrected version has been submitted to the editor”—as if they were not the ones who had submitted it themselves.

This could not have been a simple editorial oversight. Worse still, it had been hidden from us—revealed only after we demanded full transparency and received it through a secondary channel. This conduct was not merely questionable—it was a direct violation of Elsevier’s own ethical guidelines.2