Rolf Marschalek was on vacation when he saw a new paper had been published in the journal Autoimmunity. Marschalek, a biochemist at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, was “very upset,” he told Retraction Watch – because he’d peer-reviewed the manuscript and had recommended against publication.
The authors of the paper claimed to find DNA in mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines above regulators’ suggested amounts. The article appeared online September 6, and within weeks the publisher began an investigation into concerns about its content, as we reported previously.
In Marschalek’s initial review, which he provided to us, he detailed how Qubit fluorometry, one of the methods the authors used to measure the amount of DNA in the vaccine vials, was “not suited” for use when samples contain much higher amounts of RNA than DNA, as is the case with mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. He cited a paper he and colleagues had written about methods of quantifying amounts of RNA and DNA in mRNA vaccine vials, including Qubit.
The authors reported using the RNase A enzyme to break down RNA before measuring the amount of DNA, they wrote in the paper. According to Marschalek, the treatment time was too short to fully eliminate RNA in the samples.
He also singled out Figure 2 in the paper, which depicts the amount of DNA in a vaccine lot alongside the number of adverse events reported for each lot. The figure “clearly tells the reader that there is no correlation” between side effects and DNA content, Marschalek wrote in the review.
The authors — David J. Speicher of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada; independent researcher Jessica Rose, and Kevin McKernan of the Beverly, Mass.-based company Medicinal Genomics — submitted a revision, which Marschalek reviewed in July. “They didn’t change all the things I recommended,” he told us, and he wasn’t satisfied with the revisions.
“Thus, the revised version of the authors have strengthened my opinion that the whole paper is ‘a mission’ for the ‘anti-vaxx community’ and not a scientific paper,” he wrote in his review of the revision. He again recommended against publication.
Only one other time in his career has Marschalek recommended rejecting a paper and seen it published, he said.
He complained to the editor of Autoimmunity, who told him he could submit a letter to the editor, he said. He did so, but it was not published, because the journal does not publish letters to the editor, a representative of Taylor & Francis, which publishes the journal, told him. However, the publisher began an investigation of the article soon after. Scientific sleuth Kevin Patrick had also contacted the publisher with critiques of the article he had posted on PubPeer.
In his letter, Marschalek summarized the critiques in his reviews and concluded:
If the scientific community does not collectively act to counter such pseudoscientific narratives, the proliferation of misinformation threatens to erode public trust and compromise the integrity of biomedical research.
Paolo Casali, editor in chief of Autoimmunity, confirmed Marschalek did review the paper. But initially he said he was “confused” by our request for comment on the decision to publish the paper. Marschalek “did not recommend rejection of the paper,” Casali said.
According to the associate editor who handled the manuscript, Casali said, Marschalek recommended “major revision,” which the authors performed. The revised manuscript and authors’ letter “were deemed by the AE to have properly addressed the issues” raised by the original reviews, Casali said.
A representative of Taylor & Francis later got in touch with us and offered to provide a statement about “the current situation.” We’ll update this post when we have it.
Rose, one of the authors of the paper, declined to discuss with us the methodological critiques in Marschalek’s reviews or letter to the editor. But she did question how we obtained the peer reviews, which she called “confidential documents.”
She later posted on Substack that our obtaining the reviews would be “a serious ethical breach.”
Many journals now publish peer reviews online with articles, a practice which falls under the umbrella of “open peer review.”
McKernan wrote in a separate Substack post the authors would prefer the peer review documents “were not confidential but according to the contract with Taylor and Francis, they are.” He also disputed Marschalek’s statement that the RNase A treatment wasn’t enough to get rid of all the RNA in the vaccine samples.
McKernan acknowledged some of the vaccine lots with the most DNA did not have the most adverse events reported, but wrote, “nothing can be inferred from this as we don’t know the lot sizes,” which he said could vary by orders of magnitude.
As we reported in September, McKernan was also an author on a preprint about “synthetic mRNA vaccines and transcriptomic dysregulation” that was withdrawn following critiques from sleuths Elisabeth Bik and Reese Richardson. The manuscript now appears as an “article in press” at the World Journal of Experimental Medicine. According to a PDF of the paper, the peer reviewer’s report gave it a grade of C for quality and a grade of D for novelty, creativity and scientific significance.
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