Retraction Watch Steps on Another Rake
Add it to the RICO case
The authors of the Speicher paper (Kevin McKernan, Jessica Rose, David Speicher) received this email from Retraction Watch. The comments below are my own. Jessica has weighed in with editorial advice on the work and David is ill. Unfortunately, my calendar doesn’t afford the time to synchronize our response so I will do my best but the other authors may have a different view on this topic.
Just so everyone recalls, Retraction Watch is that organization funded by the Enron Tycoon known as the Arnold Foundation. They also fund PubSmear and collude on defamation projects like this.
I say defamation as its a legal term and Retraction Watch stepped in legal goo when they parroted an investor (Kevin Patrick), who later admitted to fabricating his critiques of our work. Retraction Watch never retracted their erroneous reporting on the topic. Funny how that works. An organization so committed to truth and honesty that it can’t possibly question its own fidelity.
Our attorneys are watching closely and everything related to this case is being forwarded to RFKJr and Senator Ron Johnson to document the weaponization of science. RFKJr is looking for a good RICO case against gatekeeping Journal groups and this shaping up to be a great case.
They now claim to have received Peer reviews of our manuscript? We believe these are confidential documents so we are bit confused by their statements? We actually would prefer that they were not confidential but according to the contract with Taylor and Francis, they are.
Only glitch is that none of the authors of our paper have ever seen the document Retraction Watch is circulating? So if they were part of our peer review and we didn’t see them, then there is some confusion at play.
Sounds like Retraction Watch is again engaged in tortious interference with our contract with Taylor and Francis.
We’re not surprised by the recycled comments in this Protest Letter as these very topics were raised in our review and traversed.
We are not at liberty to break the anonymity of our peer review process but seeing as this document was not part of it, we are free to respond to it. It would be a much better use of everyones time if the Journal would just put the whole process public so the authors don’t need to spend time defending the same arguments over and over again. It costs nothing to make anonymous critiques of our work and hours to defend each faulty allegation against the known authors. This is an asymmetric Sybil attack: flood the authors with anon bullshit so they can’t work on their next paper.
Once again the the Protest Letter argument opens up with Anti-vaxx pejoratives despite the 3 authors having been heavily vaccinated over the years. We all declined these mRNA vaccines as liability free mandates are unethical. Having built DNA sequencers (Kevin), I knew enough about N1-methyl-pseudoUs impact on polymerases that I knew Pharma had no measurements of the transcriptional and translational fidelity they were assuming was in place. We all passed on the COVID shots.
The only technical (non-ad hominem) critique once again discusses the Qubit AccuGreen dyes having cross talk with RNA. We addressed this by using RNase A which erases RNA. Without RNA, there can be no cross talk.
Note the author of this Protest Letter assumes the RNA:DNA is 3000:1. How does he or she know this? This is an assumption not a fact.
ChatGPT 5.o-
T7 polymerase is a linear reaction. Its not exponential like PCR so its not expected to be 3000:1. RNA:DNA, particularly when T7 is known to stall on these modified bases. Here is a Moderna paper showing just how ugly this is. They had to mutate T7 polymerase in 2022 to prevent it from template switching and stalling. Pfizers vaccine documents makes no mention of a mutated T7 polymerase so you should assume you got a product with all of those mystery bands shown as WT. This is why the Agilent traces of their mRNA look degraded. It is not degradation. It is polymerase infidelity with 800 modified N1-methyl-PseudoUs per strand.
As a result of this, anyone trained in using polymerases with 100% replacement of Uracil would bank on the efficiency being 40% of what you can achieve with unmodified bases. 80-400:1 is a more supportable assumption. If using 1ug of plasmid input, expect 8-40ug so 8-40:1 from a mass standpoint. There is no literature provided by the protest author to support their 3000:1 assertion and Retraction Watch being as biased as the are, don’t seem to ask for it.
The Author of the Protest Letter (bottom of thread) made a second assertion without evidence. Specifically, they claim we did not use enough RNase A. We used 20ug of RNase A which is enough to digest 100ug of RNA according to Qiagen.
We used this on 1ul or 1/300th of a Pfizer dose or 1/500th of a Moderna dose.
30ug Pfizer dose with a 300ul dose = 100ng/ul with enough enzyme to digest 100ug!
100ug Moderna dose with a 500ul dose = 200ng/ul with enough enzyme to digest 100ug!
So the RNase A we used was 500X-1000X in excess!
We also performed a time series to demonstrate the RNase A reaction was complete.
The undisclosed person making these assertions provided no such evidence for his/her claim about insufficient RNase A, once again leading us to ask, why is this persons conflicts not on record like the authors of the paper in question? Are his comments held to the same scrutiny as the peer review process we went through?
Is this another “known to fabricate data” ‘Investor’ that Retraction Watch so recklessly parroted before?
The more pertinent question the Protest Letter author should ask is if Pfizer is using the right amount of DNaseI and if this is even the right enzyme for the job considering the EMA has repeatedly critiqued Pfizer over this enzymes poor performance. Invitrogen and NEB understand this problem and both have enzymes designed to deal with the fact that DNaseI CANNOT PROCESS RNA:DNA Hybrids (Sutton et al). Given the EMA has cited Pfizer on these DNA clean up failures, why is this Protest Author not advocating for more transparency from the liability free mandated product when its clear as day that Pfizer is using the wrong enzyme for the job. What could possible create such a bias?
In a final attempt to attack the person as opposed to the data at hand, The author of the Protest Letter next takes issue with our preprints. The preprints are not under review and were substantially toned down and refactored. Nevertheless, the protest author asserts that this DNA risk has been repeatedly refuted by the scientific community. His/Her survey of the scientific field is… drum roll…..
you guessed it!
Omniscient Fact Checkers:)
That’s hilarious considering Moderna’s own patents underscore the oncogenic risk of the residual DNA and that you shouldn’t use qPCR as it will under-measure the problem. These patents are cited in the manuscript this protest author claims to have read. These are Moderna’s own words so if they are also scientific outcasts, where does that leave the authors argument trusting this same organization for the quantity of DNA in their products?
Science Feedback used to be Climate Feedback where they would do similar things to bend the Climate change narrative. FactCheck.org has UPENN funding. Thats the University that has over $1B in mRNA vaccine royalty! Real objective journalism coming out of Retraction Watch.
But we are not surprised.
They have already shown their incompetence trusting an ‘Investor’ who later admitted to lying to Taylor and Francis.
The Protest author makes claims about my prior writing containing errors without specification. I have over 60K citations to my 30 year career and have never had a paper retracted or even threatened for retraction until I found DNA contamination in a $100B liability free mandated product.
Despite this impeccable record, I have had people from PubSmear threaten to retract all my papers in 2025 before they have even seen them. Nothing like supporting this vindictive and tribal game of politics in the name scientific fidelity.
The author of the Protest Letter continues to opine on my attention-seeking motivations. This is pure speculation on their behalf. The reality is that most people speaking out about the vaccine are getting delicensed, censored, banned from social media, doxxed and harassed. This is hardly the attention anyone likes to attract. This is a classic narcissistic tactic known as DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim-Offender.
Any attention seeking benefits of publishing volunteer work are dwarfed by the $100B in profits for liability free mandated products. This is a laughable contradiction to the authors position and another non-sequitur to the data at hand. If you can’t attack the data, you attack the person. This is the reason many journals are asking for Anon submissions where the authors names and institutions are hidden during the review process.
The final technical points raised regarding ‘correlation’ were also addressed in Peer Review. It is true that some of the lots that had the most DNA did NOT have the most SAEs but as we state in the manuscript, nothing can be inferred from this as we don’t know the lot sizes. The lot sizes are known to vary by orders of magnitude. So lots with high DNA may have small lot sizes and may not collect as many SAEs. The reverse is also true. High DNA lots with high SAEs may simply be very large lots and have nothing to do with the DNA. In absence of transparent lot sizes we are left with a Simpsons paradox. The best we can do is measure as many vials as we can find and report honestly. To date this is the largest study attempting to do just that. There is no obligation in a paper to only report surprising findings. Even if your results are inconclusive, you report them. To suggest otherwise is to design papers to come to a certain conclusion in advance. That is not science.
Speicher et al clearly states the exploratory nature of this correlation and its inconclusive nature.
“and to confirm if this correlation exists”
We did not make any conclusive correlations and we are very clear about that.
But this is what they do. They did this to the Gibo retraction. They accused the authors of drawing Correlation = Causation when the authors never did any such thing.
It was the same parties involved. Retraction Watch colluding with PubSmear and fabricating claims of authors over stating the conclusions of their data.
Note Gibo is very clear about not stepping on this line and the title of their paper even sells the work as a simple observation.
The protest author then goes on to reinforce the safe and effective narrative. This is off topic. Our paper is not debating the rate of myocarditis and frankly the number they cite we can find ample papers published by non-conflicted authors that find the number to be much more worrisome at 1:800 SAE’s (Fraiman et al)
This is a non-sequitur complaining about us monitoring the DNA concentration as it might imply their holy vaccine should be questioned. This is outside the scope of how to measure DNA in these vaccines. There is plenty of literature including Moderna’s own patent to justify it may be a concern.
In their final paragraph they attempt to bandwagon (associative fallacy) our paper with another paper this same network has attacked: Konig et al.
Konig has clearly won that debate. Kaiser is funded by BioNtech. Never disclosed this and their methods are fatally flawed having used an EtOH precipitation to remove the small DNA before measurement.
That was covered here.
And here
The same flaws exist in the Ach’s preprint. They also have conflicted vaccine industry funding and made the same intentional ‘mistakes’ as Kaiser et al. I say intentional as anyone in the field knows you don’t do this. You measure the actual injected product, not some derivative you manipulated with methods know to remove small DNA.
The Protest Letter sent to us by Redaction Watch is at the bottom of this thread.
You will note this author also uses a classic technique of citation spamming, where they include citations they haven’t read to make their case without mentioning that these citations are also from people funded by the vaccine space and also agree with our stated risks.
This Vieths et al paper is behind a paywall so their AI platform probably didn’t make this obvious to them. Nor did it draw the connection that these authors claim to have no conflicts when it is their very organization that failed to find this DNA before it was injected into billions of people. You read that correctly. PEI was the QC lab for the DNA in the vaccines so of course they have investigated themselves and declared no issue and no conflicts!
Hilariously, there is another paper that cites Vieth et al. The author of the Protest Letter won’t mention Roncati et al as it doesn’t tow the party line.
Roncati et al agrees with our position that DNA isn’t harmless.
This article will be sent to RFKJr, Senator Ron Johnson, the ACIP committee and Science Guardians. We would like to thank Retraction Watch for stepping on yet another rake and providing evidence of the Weaponization of Science.
Here is the Kicker. Thanks to Fred Stadler for the file forensics.
Take the PDF that illustrious Ellie Kincaid sent us and run PDFinfo on it.
Amateur hour Journalism. They left the Anon author in the properties of the PDF review they sent us!
Guess who the Anon person is? Rolf Marschalek should learn to code.
This is the Kaiser paper which has BioNtech funding via DFG.
So Retraction Watch is colluding with Pharma to protect their product lines. Seems like Racketeering to me.
Thank you again for your excellent work. I am so grateful that you're exposing this weaponization of science. Their lack of integrity in pursuing these nonsensical accusations is beyond disgusting. I am so disappointed - almost frightened, really - to find that people I once thought to be intelligent are blind to what's going on.
It’s been sad to see the capture and decline of research institutions, publishers and reviewers over my lifetime. I used to think that Retraction Watch could be helpful in navigating this decline, but I have come to see it as part of the problem. This post is clearly confirmatory.