One of the features of trying to do this work while maintaining a full time job, is that I cannot suffer fools. I do not have the time for rabbit holes and pet theories that might incubate a false following. I have to be laser focused on the aspects of this problem that are most likely to result in legal resolution with the least distraction to my day job. This focuses me on aspects of these vaccines that are easy to measure and replicate even if they are not the prime cause of the problem. We can moan all we want about the toxicity of the LNPs but if you don’t have an exponential assay like PCR to measure LNPs in patients, you will forever be stuck in the land of academic arguments and journal clubs.
Today’s post will be a mixture of rational advances being made in the field and destructive bat shit crazy distractions.
Shortly, after the FDA-Student paper published, lawyers are beginning to remind the FDA of their Duty to Investigate. This is because we focused on a problem that could be measured in a decentralized manner and now even High Schoolers are capable of showing the FDA they have a problem. There are many other hypotheses of harm that may in fact be more toxic than DNA contamination but they are not easy to measure and thus you need an institution to do it and those institutions are unlikely to play your covid dissident game if they have any Pharma ties. DNA is one of those forensic markers that is in every vial, now decentralized around the world, cant be taken out and the PCR/Qubit install base is massive. Its one of the most ubiquitous assays in Biotech.
This law firm stepped up and reminded the FDA of their 505(o)(3) obligations to investigate.
Now we enter the PsyOp soup.
While lawyers are using this paper to drive accountability at the FDA, Geoff Pain has other plans and would like to sharpen his propeller head on these students.
Geoff Pain has been pushing for the retraction and full on deletion of the FDA-Student paper over a few student level foot faults he has magnified into some “military PsyOp”. The PsyOp is that the paper is being pushed to bolster Moderna over Pfizer. Pfizer has ~ 2/3rds of the marketshare for these vaccines and $791.5M in royalty is going into the NIH for Pfizer/BioNtech with $400M for Moderna.
This is full on quantum Spaceballs material. No evidence is provided in the below 3 hour Twitter spaces to support this other than the lots used in this study overlap with lots that are involved in a legal case against the military.
The VAERs experts on the call remind him that the lot sizes are unknown so its hard to quantitate the odds of this coincidence. There is discussion in the spaces about some secret data people ‘pinged’ off of servers from some dark actor that can no longer be reached but its not clear these sources will stand legal scrutiny. Geoff seems unphased by this push back but reminds the listeners that “he was the first person in the whole world to figure out these lots”.
Nobel prize material.
Geoff is clearly aware that early trial lots were 37ml and later lots were 370 Liter batches. This means the lots size can vary 10,000 fold so its hard to claim the lots were only used in the Military and any absence of evidence in VAERs could just be poor distribution or small lots.
The second argument rests on the fact that the FDA White Oak facility leaked RSV (according to Robert Malone) and therefor the blurry lot numbers in the students paper must have a deeper meaning. I agree that this might be another GOF lab that should be scrutinized but I don’t see how that relates to a retraction of the Students paper.
He’s very upset that the paper lacks transparency on the lots used and that the paper mistook bivalent lots for monovalent lots. This has no consequence on the conclusions drawn by paper which I will explain below.
When we called him out on why he buried his retraction argument behind his paywall and how you can’t ask for more student transparency while lacking to offer it yourself, he got a little spicy. I normally would not share an email like this but he referred to it in a public X-Spaces accusing me of misrepresenting him so here it is.
So Geoff isn’t just asking for a retraction. He’s asking for full on deletion and re-review with new reviewers while old and new reviews put public for all to see. This is even more extreme than a retraction as retraction never deletes a paper. The DOI remains but the meta data is altered to signal its been retracted. The errors in this paper at most warrant an erratum or correction (See below FDA substack) but not a retraction according to COPE guidelines. I’ve ask Geoff many times to spell out which of the COPE guidelines for retraction did the students breach and he has remained silent on this point.
Why on Earth would you demand all this peer review transparency from behind your paywall? Yes.. Geoff was able to find a substack article of mine related to Cannabis and Endotoxin that was still behind a paywall as it was a scratch pad for this fully open source OSF.io preprint that published at the SAME TIME (1:31:00). I’ve since set it public so everyone can see what a hallow argument Geoff is making here as the substack contains no information that is not in the Public PrePrint and is just a mirror to the preprint.
This is a theme you are you going to see with Geoff; very hollow arguments.
Come down the rabbit hole and see where delusions of grandeur, anxiety and OCD can lead you.
Note Geoff is calling for deletion of the article (above email) and a replacement with one that contains his suggested edits. He now claims in this X-Spaces that this is not a call for retraction and that we are bending his words. It is in fact a more severe request than retraction as deletion and replacement with new review is being requested and there is no guarantee the re-review will result in publication in 6 months or ever. It effectively hides the paper for key period of time and may usher in hostile reviewers that spike the paper. Very destructive suggestion. Saboteur level shit.
Geoff also made false claims that the Journal was an AI peer review. This is false. The Journal has an AI screen they ‘may use’, after which human reviewers step in and they guarantee all papers receive 2 human reviewers.
There are a few points Geoff makes in this X-spaces that went unchallenged.
1)Moderna lots were measured and shown to be clean therefor the paper is meant to show Moderna is cleaner than Pfizer (52:40:00 & 54:00:00). This is true according to Speicher et al but THIS IS FALSE as it pertains to this paper. No Moderna vials were studied in the FDA-Student paper so clearly David Speicher is the PsyOp Geoff let off the hook! Pfizer has given ~2X more royalty to NIH than Moderna so why would the government favor Moderna over Pfizer?
Geoff is confusing a Moderna biosimilar vial from BEI/ATCC with real Moderna product. Biosimilar products are not Moderna products but instead a home brewed vaccine using Moderna’s version of the spike sequence made by other manufacturers and never injected into people. They are RUO reagents not meant for human consumption. This nullifies Geoffs entire Military PsyOp argument and demonstrates he didn’t read the paper with any discerning eye.
2)Two other times in this X-Spaces (2:01:20 & 2:41:40), Geoff reveals that he didn’t read the paper. Or he knows he’s in a crowd that can’t discern his own PsyOp. 2 hours in he claims the students used PCR to quantitate this DNA.
NOPE! This is false.
They used a Qubit. That is not qPCR. He also claims that the Bivalent vs Monovalent mislabels is a retractable offense because it would screw up the qPCR primer quantitation?
How is that possible?
Both monovalent and bivalent vaccines are monitored with a Kan Gene assay which is the same between the two valencies and the FDA-Student study isn’t using qPCR?
Complete whack-a-doodle flat earth level bullshit. Did he really not read the paper? Is this intentional deception to misdirect his audience? Can he be this sloppy while grand standing a retraction of the students? His errors are so much larger than the High Schoolers:)
3)The Agilent Traces are not labelled. This is irrelevant. Many studies pool samples and run them as ensemble measurements to get averages of fragment lengths across many samples to save costs. These students are on a budget. The fact that the students took the more costly approach to split the samples out into individual lanes isn’t a critique when they could have pooled them to demonstrate the same point and you’d have no visibility on lane to lane variance. This is pedantic OCD foot faulting no one cares about but Geoff. I agree, their methods only provide qualitative understanding of fragment lengths and they need ONT to properly quantitate fragment lengths but the lane labeling on Figure 5 is the least of my concerns.
4)He critiques the students for not measuring the endotoxin levels in the paper (1:40:20). That is not the focus of the paper and is a strawman argument for retraction.
5)He claims the Wang paper is exaggerating the number as it didn’t use RNaseA (1:41:50). This is false. It did use RNaseA. If there is any exaggeration in the study its from the Nanodrop. The Qubit data is under measuring the problem with a poor DNA prep and not understanding Georgiou et al.
Yes, Im being unusually harsh on Geoff.
This is why.
A)1 Hour into this X-Spaces Geoff make a clumsy yet deliberate attempt to Dox Jikkyleaks. Its a federal crime in Australia to Dox a whistleblower. He has repeatedly been asked not to do this but still does. This is vindictive behavior.
B)At various points throughout this X-Spaces, he speaks disparagingly towards
, (calls her a former bioweapons inspector), Jikky, hints at McCullough, myself and others. Never assume malice in people that come to a different opinion than yours. Once may be accidental. Twice may be coincidence. Multiple times looks like enemy fire.C)Last year when I was working on Endotoxins in Cannabis, I threw a few vaccines into a thermo LAL assay. I mistakenly shared this preliminary data with Geoff but asked him not to publish it as I didn’t believe it and wanted to run more controls. That didn’t stop Geoff from sharing data he didn’t generate and pin my name to it. During this X-Spaces he tries to make some claim that I measured 19 EUs in the vaccines (1:40:30). I want to be very clear. I never published that number and do not endorse it.
I don’t think the LAL assay I’m using can properly measure this. The Endotoxin likely hides inside the LNPs making it unavailable for the LAL assay and every detergent or heating step I tried to use to open the LNPs would inhibit the LAL assay when spiked or applied to the endotoxin standards.
Geoff, this is actual academic behavior that is worthy of retraction according to COPE guidelines as its pure plagiarism.
D)Geoff goes on to make some magical claims about what CFUs are (2hrs in). Colony forming units are not bacteria that “hug each other”(1:34:20). They are derived from a single bacteria when performed correctly and this can be proven with cross correlation with qPCR, Optical Density and digital or single cell qPCR. I have seen no evidence of live E.coli contamination in the vaccines. In fact, I think the LNPs are toxic to them.
The 1 CFU/10ml requirement (2:34:00) doesn’t mean there is 1 CFU in 11 mls. Its just the LOD of their assay. They likely plate 10mls of vaccine and get no colonies. We have looked for E.coli gDNA with qPCR and get no signal or signal so late (CT 35) its close to the NTC signal for the assay. This is 1 million fold lower than the plasmid DNA and not a concern in my opinion. The endotoxin may still be a concern but I’ve not seen any methods that independently measures it or where the data are not redacted by regulatory agencies. Open to be corrected here as I have not followed it closely. I think the proper assay to measure this requires LC/MS which is very expensive hardware and not decentralized. This would be a more serious offense than DNA contamination but at the moment lacks legally actionable data.
He also mentioned these E.coli DNA limits are attograms (2:04:00)? 1 picogram of 6Mb E.coli genome is 162 copies of its genome. 10 femtograms is 1.6 copies. I don’t know where Geoff is getting his attograms number from but that would represent sub single genome requirements which are meaningless as they are not viable.
I don’t understand this behavior. Its either a desperate attempt at relevancy or destructive well poisoning. Perhaps both? Either way, the desperation is something I encourage people to avoid as it often exudes friendly fire and obsesses over details that derail progress.
Appendix,
The difference between Retractions and Erratums/Corrigendum
Pain seems to be completely off his rocker. His behavior was exceedingly unprofessional sharing your preliminary work, let alone work you felt was incomplete and required more study. Work that you concluded wasn’t correct. That was a red flag from the outset. Couple that with more recent behavior and it seems that he is possibly mentally unstable. In his desire to expose the vaccines as unsafe products he has chosen to vilify aspects of their dangers if he doesn’t believe one aspect of it is less important than possibly others. That anyone focusing on a potential issue that he sees isn’t the most important in his opinion, is some who working against his pet complaint.
This has been an ongoing problem with members of Pandata for over a year. While it would be nice to believe that this overzealousness is rooted in true desire to bring to light the inherent dangers in these products, as time goes along, it seems to be willful misdirection. Why? Because as McKernan points out, this DNA contamination issue is the one MOST EASILY LITIGATED!!!
So why has this group chosen to attack the research that helps in building the groundwork necessary for other researchers to build upon and delve more deeply into what these contaminants are ultimately causing to occur in vitro?
There seems to be some hidden agenda at work here and it’s likely not good. I feel that Pain has been unduly influenced by people who have a nefarious agenda and have put him into nearly a fugue state of mind, where he can no longer think clearly and is behaving irrationally.
This noise over a few mistakes in a high school genetics study paper, which could easily be corrected and have no real bearing on the results, can be easily corrected is unnecessary. It doesn’t negate the fact that 7 other professional labs, with highly credentialed researchers had already found similar results.
The people in the PANDA sphere appear to be in the process of splintering the cohesiveness of researchers seeking answers. It’s a divide and conquer strategy that ultimately likely traces back to BigPharma™ and their desire to limit theirs and their insurer’s liability.
I've had to block him. He tried to claim that IgG4 class switching was caused by lps endotoxin contamination. This makes zero sense as it would act as a superantigen, especially with Spike.
So I asked for references.
After repeated requests he linked his Substack and 4 references in it.
I followed each one up in detail as I could be wrong, but they were either totally irrelevant or said the exact opposite.