Arnold Foundation funded RetractionWatch Parrots an "Investor"

No homework actually performed on their own

RetractionWatch, also known to be funded by the Enron Tycoon founded “Arnold Foundation” now outsources all of their critical thinking to a PubSmear keyboard warrior known as Kevin Patrick.

Kevin Patrick is known to be “An Investor” and has no training in Molecular biology which is why his assertions on our paper are falling short.

Note how RetractionWatch considers this to be “Exclusive” content despite them doing little work themselves.

Below is from the RetractionWatch “Exclusive” investigation.

Note the circular reinforcement, attempting to recycle a smear. When the same mob of PubSmear people attacked a previous preprint of ours, they seem to think that this is some form of reinforcing data point.

They didn’t bother to look into their sources to see if they are in fact working with honest intentions.

Yes, members of PubSmear announced their intentions to target my papers long before they had even read them. This tweet is from January 6th, 2025.

Other members solicit for payments to retract papers.

But lets go through Kevin Patricks criticisms and see if they hold any merit.

Wrong. Regulators do recognize fluorometry as a standard and in fact rely on it to measure the RNA in the shots. Kevin Patrick doesn’t know this as he doesn’t read the EMA documents that disclose this. The EMA documents were cited in our paper. He should read every citation before making such overt errors. These plasmids are coming from E.coli cells. A qPCR assay targeting only the plasmid will never quantify all of the DNA when extracting this from an E.coli host.

This incoherence is discussed in Konig et al.

Kevin Patrick’s critique also assumes RNA is present to interfere with the Fluorometry readings when our paper was very specific about the use of RNaseA to eliminate this concern. So he either hasn’t read the paper, doesn’t understand what RNaseA is, or is simply erecting a straw man argument to cast shade on this alarming paper.

I hope Kevin Patrick (the investor) is forced to disclose his conflicts of interest, just like the authors are required to do so. To this day, no one knows exactly what Kevin Patrick is invested in. This form of asymmetric review, where conflicted parties can cast non-peer reviewed comments, demanding retraction while never being scrutinized with COI disclosures, erodes the entire Peer Review credulity.

Kevin Patrick , the investor, also doesn’t stop to address the fact that our paper measured the DNA with both qPCR and Fluorometry and noted a 100 fold (6 CT) difference with qPCR depending on which amplicon is used. The regulators are only using a single amplicon (KAN). If its now known that a qPCR based DNA quant can vary 100 fold by using different amplicons, this surely is a relevant finding that should not be hidden with a straw man request for retraction but instead approached with open debate. The use of these 2 different methods is actively debated in the paper and thus there is no intent to mislead but in fact to teach the reader the limitations of both methods and their appropriateness given we know DNaseI doesn’t digest the plasmid uniformly and E.coli DNA could also be present.

Complaint #2 & 3

His concerns over the use of VAERs data is linked below.

Yet our paper specifically lists this limitation and cautions this work is preliminary. Another straw man from the investor.

Our Autoimmunity paper below

His third critique in the above paragraph is hyperventilating over citation 15.

Kevin Patrick, the investor, doesn’t seem to like us citing various documents which link to our PrePrint. Preprints are allowed as citations so this is a very weak argument. Failure to cite our own preprint or related white papers (citation 15) could result in accusations of plagiarism.

From our Autoimmunity paper.

These primer sequences are listed in citation 15 (Table 2 below). If we fail to cite them, they will trigger plagiarism accusations as Dr. Speicher is the only author (of the 3 on this Autoimmunity paper) on that Australian work. Below is the table from the Australian PDF. This exact table exists in our Autoimmunity paper. Failure to cite it will be flagged by plagiarism screens and thus Kevin Patrick is once again hyperventilating.

Complaint #4) This one was actually generated by RetractionWatch and now I see why they outsource their thinking to Kevin Patrick.

FDA guidance for gene therapies are in fact relevant to this discussion given SV40 promoters (used in gene therapy) were discovered in the these vaccines and never disclosed to the regulators.

Thorn et al (Pfizer) even published the fact that they used their Gene Therapy plasmids to bootstrap their efforts.

Banoun et al has documented all the reasons why these products qualify as gene therapies including the SECs Filing from Moderna that clearly states they are considered Gene Therapies BY THE FDA. Unless RetractionWatch would like to engage in securities fraud they should learn to retract their statements.

Banoun et al. below.

So why does RetractionWatch parrot PubSmear? They are both funded by the Arnold Foundation and it doesn’t appear RetractionWatch provides any novelty other than to paraphrase or plagiarize investors from PubSmear. Wonder when they will retract themselves?