In February, the editor-in-chief of Food and Chemical Toxicology published an editorial calling for “Papers on potential toxic effects of COVID-19 vaccines.” Following this call, in April 2022, the journal – no stranger to Retraction Watch readers – published an article titled “Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs.”
At more than 16,000 words and more than 200 references, the article was submitted on February 9th and accepted on April 8th. It claims that “billions of lives are potentially at risk” with Covid-19 vaccines.
Such an important statement should be supported by facts. But this is not at all the case. And yet the paper has been shared more than 45,000 times on social media, in ways that decrease trust in science and the COVID-19 vaccine, despite the robust evidence that it is both safe and efficient.
We submitted a letter to the editor to highlight major flaws and obvious shortcomings in the article including several misunderstandings of the provided bibliography. In this letter, preprinted on OSF, we asked for the retraction of the article and thoroughly detailed all of the issues we found in the paper which, combined, severely undermine the authors’ conclusions.
Our letter consists of a table collecting several instances where the authors misused previous literature as well as an explanation of why their claims based on the reference they used were wrong. For instance, the authors argue, against all available evidence, that the vaccination “induces a profound impairment of Type I interferon signaling which has various adverse consequences to human health.” They further rely on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which cannot establish causation and is comprised of self-reports, not checked for accuracy.
This letter was read by four reviewers whose names were unknown to us. Three initially recommended against publishing it. Reviewer 1 argued there was no reason for retraction because “there is no evidence of scientific fraud that justifies the demand for retraction of the original submission.” They also claimed that “The main focus of their allegation is based on the size of the review article and the average time period for a journal to evaluate a submission for publication.”
Reviewer 2 initially stated that “the authors point out some issues which are relevant,” but did not think the paper should be retracted. They found our letter “somewhat offensive.” No need for the original paper to be somewhat accurate, this reviewer argued, since “This is a review, so conjecture is allowed, if dis-proven it is fine.” They went on: “I recognize some are using this to feed falsehoods in social media, but that’s not the responsibility of FCT [the publishing journal] to monitor.”
Reviewer 3 made more constructive remarks and gave us feedback for the letter to be published. They advised us to soften our overall tone.
Reviewer 4 made some astonishing claims such as “the letter starts with some statements concerning the reviewing process (lengths of the manuscript, duration of the evaluation period) which are largely irrelevant (as they are not directly related to mistakes in the article).” Reviewer 4 further directly states that the editor had reasons to want the Seneff et al. article published fast. Reading this, one could wonder what the peer-reviewing process is made for if not detecting mistakes in the manuscript.
They questioned our experience and previous work, going even as far as to check our resumés: “None of the authors of the LTE [letter to the editor] is obviously experienced in editing top quality scientific journals” and “In this context it is notable that I noticed that the first author of the LTE has published only two full length articles in international scientific journals which concern immune response towards mRNA and other vaccines (as well as several short letters, editorial remarks, and a review). Also other coauthors seem to have only limited experience in the area.”
We found the inclusion of those comments – which presumably had been read by the editor in chief – unacceptable. The merits of a submission should stand on their own, regardless of the expertise of the authors. We found it particularly ironic, given that no such background check seems to have been done on the authors of the original paper. Indeed, the authors of the original article are a computer scientist who often publishes controversial papers in low-impact journals on biology and medical topics, a naturopath, a microbiologist, and a cardiologist. Our team includes two oncologists who would appear to be particularly relevant considering the original claims that “there will be billions of cancers due to Covid-19 vaccines.”
The editor in chief suggested we revise our letter to take their comments into account. Despite removing our comment on what we found to be a surprisingly short time between the call for papers and the submission of the manuscript, Reviewer 2 still saw this as a reason to reject our letter at round 2, raising concerns on whether our revision had been considered. Reviewer 2 also stood their ground and said the letter should be rejected despite the fact that we had softened our demand for retraction to a suggestion.
And Reviewer 4, despite acknowledging that we “inserted some corrections in the revised version which [they] suggested,” recommended our letter to be rejected because the table analyzing the bibliographics errors of the original manuscripts did not seem clear to them.
Our letter was then, unsurprisingly, rejected by the editor in chief of Food and Chemical Toxicology. So its influence continues to spread, even mentioned by Fox News host Tucker Carlson to argue – inaccurately – that the vaccine can harm your immune system.
Let us be clear: misunderstanding and misusing the literature, making unsupported claims, and distorting facts is not opening a scientific debate. We will not give up, and we will find other ways of publishing our retraction demand.
Jérôme Barriere is a medical oncologist at Polyclinique Saint-Jean in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. Fabrice Frank, Alexander Samuel, and Eric Billy are independent researchers. Lonni Besançon is a postdoctoral fellow at Linköping University, Véronique Saada is a pharmacist at the Gustave Roussy Anticancer Center in Villejuif, France, Barbara Seitz-Polski is an immunologist at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU) Nice, and Jacques Robert is a professor emeritus of oncology at Université de Bordeaux.
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Consider not being a -participant- in retractions, especially in a politically laden field such as covid medicine. Consider simply independently -documenting- the retraction phenomenon.
It’s a guest post. The “we” in the title refers to the authors.
I support your honest effort to seek the retraction of utter nonsense. I also support your attempt to highlight where in the current publishing process essential activities appear to be really substandard.
Disclaimer: co-author of the blog post
” current publishing process essential activities appear to be really substandard.”
It is really the thing that still surprises me. Especially for such a big journal, I really don’t understand how the paper has passed peer review in the first place, but the fact that our rebuttal then does not is more than surprising.
“Utter nonsense” meaning “actual science that goes against State Narrative.”
I’m very disappointed how hard it is to get articles like this retracted. Politics should never override science, but here we are (and have been since at least as far back as Galileo Galilei).
“Politics should never override science” yet you want science that comes to inconvenient conclusions retracted and the authors silenced.
“Importantly, only 14% of COVID-19 VAERS-reported deaths as of June 2021 could have vaccination ruled out as a cause (McLachlan et al., 2021).” – Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations
Ah yes, if one cannot rule something out, then surely it must be responsible. In 100% of these deaths, we cannot rule out exposure to sasquatch dung.
Posts like this, i.e., those that provide the story behind retractions, are very valuable to share and I’m glad Retraction watch does so.
As a toxicologist, I was particularly interested in the actions & comments of the Food and Chemical Toxicology journal and their reviewers. Regardless of one’s scientific background, the claim of billions of lives potentially at risk should have been a red flag for misinformation. I’m amazed that a (formerly) credible journal published the article.
I also thank Jérôme Barriere and the others working with him on this retractions.
Thanks for your kind comment. We are also surprised that the paper got published considering the very strong and not backed-up claims that are made in it.
We still hope to get it retracted.
The article may well be rubbish, but so is the claim “and the COVID-19 vaccine, despite the robust evidence that it is both safe and efficient”. The evidence that it is either is far from robust, regardless of VAERS there are fully documented cases of both death and serious injury for which compensation has been paid, so not safe for those individuals. As to efficient how quickly does this efficiency fall, It has little to no effect on transmission, or prevention of catching covid.
If “safe” means that no one ever has an adverse reaction, no treatment or medication in the history of medicine has ever been safe. I do not think this is a reasonable standard.
Amoxicillin and azithromycin are commonly used antibiotics which have saved a lot of lives. If I take either one I get horribly sick. Should they therefore not be used? That would leave us with no antibiotics at all.
The safety data reported by Pfizer is obviously fake : https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635/rr
Even some cases of fulminant pericarditis mysteriously disappeared : https://davidhealy.org/disappeared-in-argentina/
Fortunately some american lawyers are perfectly aware of that and they’re working on future litigations, HRSA’s CICP can be bypassed if the data appears to be fraudulent, which is obviously the case (with a probability of 1.7 x 10^-176 that it occured by chance)
[citation needed], not just a self-citation.
Your BMJ link is a forum comment by a non-specialist who misinterprets the article he is citing. The article actually says that 2% of those who received the vaccine reported itching, rash, hives, etc. This is not something that will amount to a fraud case in a court of law
Please explain how you can have 2% of allergic reactions in real world and 0 in 21720 participants from a clinical trial. The “non specialist” (me) is already able to use a binomial distribution P(X=0) where X follows B(21720, 0.0195).
Is it normal to see Eric Billy described as an “independent researcher” in this article while he is an employee of Novartis based in Basel, Switzerland ?
Eric Billy did this work on his free time and outside of his job. If you had arguments about the content of the post, you would not have to resort to fallacious ones.
As he has financial ties to a pharmaceutical industry, it must be disclosed
Why? It wasn’t part of his work, he’s not defending his employer, he’s engaged in pointing out nonsense. And yes, it’s nonsense.
he works for a vaccine manufacturer.
Surya, can you list the vaccines that Novartis manufactures? Beyond the filling support it provides to BioNtech, please, because that’s not their vaccine and they do not manufacture it.
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/curevac-novartis-team-up-latest-pandemic-vaccine-manufacturing-collaboration
Best practice is to include a straightforward disclosure of any relationships that could be perceived as competing interests. For example, “Eric Billy is employed by Novartis, a pharmaceutical company. However his contributions to this article were made in a personal capacity, on his own time, without review or other involvement from his employer.” Failing to acknowledge competing interests can feed criticisms of bias, as might be reflected in this comment string. PLOS has one of the better discussions that I’ve seen of competing interests, which are broader and more subjective than financial COI. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests
This is absolutely true and something that Eric has now done in his more recent academic submissions. The phrasing you suggest is very good. Thanks. However, we are here talking about a guest blog post and not an academic paper so we thought that it was not necessary to include.
Surprise! Shitty journal is shitty!
First author of paper in question, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Seneff
It’s strange that there’s no substance in this post, no way to know anything about the original paper or the arguments against it. It looks pretty lazy and biased to form opinions based on this post – there’s nothing here. I guess I can look at the letter, but the authors’ obvious lack of rigor here is a bad sign.
If you wanted, you could follow the provided links to the original paper, and to the letter. This is intended to discuss the process. Perhaps you misunderstood that? Or if you want to know more about the likely risks and benefits of mRNA vaccines, you might choose to go here. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35370016/
The conflict of interest is a major point to be considered. So many clinical trials developed, yet only few of them are reliable.
Opinion: No one should be given right to cancel different opinion, and especially not one published in scientific journals. Whoever thinks scientific method is endangered by a review article should submit his counter arguments as a letter, article… Scientific community, will judge the merit of arguments. Editors should decide on retraction.
One should be very careful to point out any conflict of interest. Failing to acknowledge competing interests can feed criticisms of bias.
One should always promote truthful arguments, and refrain from deliberately obscuring the facts.
Myocarditis risk from mRNA vaccines in young males is a real fact. The authors of the letter dismiss the myocarditis risk, dismissing solid science, quality studies, without real arguments, just playing with words (studies do not investigate pericarditis so one does not have to discuss myocarditis).
Science is built on seeking the truth.
Despite the vested interest, most clinical trials in the US pharmaceutical industry can be relied on. How do we know this? Roughly 90% of drug fail while in clinical trials. If companies were manipulating the data, we’d see far higher success rates (not a 90% failure rate).
This is even evident in drugs pulled off the market. E.g., Vioxx was pulled off because of cardiac risks, after it had been approved. It was actually a study by Merck, i.e., Vioxx’s inventor, that found the cardiac risk and based on this, Merck withdrew the drug from the market. Merck was studying Vioxx to see if it would reduce the occurrence of colon cancer (and increase the sales of the drug).
The occurrence of cardiac effects was very rare in the study population, but high enough to give Merck concern. If they were manipulating the data, this never would have happened.
To contrast: In China, the National Medical Products Administration (NPMA), the equivalent of FDA, was concerned about the level of fabricated data, so they passed an innovative law. If a company was found to have submitted fraudulent data, NMPA would ban them from new submissions for 3 years. When this law went in place, 80% of the new drug submissions in China were withdrawn.