scientist alleges Forced retraction of Covid vaccine cancer-risk study

Written by Rebekah Barnett on June 7, 2024. Posted in Current News

Explosive new evidence uncovered in a two-years long investigation reveals that one of the authors of a retracted paper revealing the Covid vaccines’ potential to cause cancers never agreed to its retraction, which she now claims was “forced” in “violation of academic ethics.” Emails obtained under FOIA corroborate her story

The scandal involving Stockholm University, reputable peer-reviewed science publisher MDPI, and a high-level National Institutes for Health (NIH) employee has serious implications for scientific integrity, and for the risk of cancer globally – predominantly for women.

In October 2021, an important scientific paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal, MDPI Viruses,1highlighting that the spike protein from both the SARS-Cov-2 virus and the associated vaccines* damages key DNA repair pathways.

The study generated a lot of publicity due to its implications for immune suppression and cancers arising from repeat exposure to Covid infections and vaccination. The authors’ findings have since been confirmed in other peer-reviewed scientific studies, but in the highly-politicised environment at the time, they were new and controversial.

The study was then swiftly retracted under strange circumstances, with the first author requesting the retraction of his own paper. Stranger still, the same editor who approved the paper for publication then did a 180 and approved its retraction.

Some speculated that Jiang had been pressured to request the retraction in a politically-motivated effort to bury evidence of Covid vaccine harms.

Now, one of the authors of the study alleges that this was indeed the case.

The paper, titled ‘SARS-CoV-2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro’ was authored by Dr Hui Jiang of Stockholm University and Dr Ya-Fang Mei of Umeå University.

In an email exchange, Mei informed me that Stockholm University pressured Jiang to request retraction of the paper, and that she never consented to the retraction.

“Stockholm University initially decided to retract the paper without the authors’ consent, a clear violation of academic ethics,” she said.

“Stockholm University asked the first author, Hui Jiang, to retract it, and they began to formalize the process. This is an illegal retraction. I have reported to the editorial office that the retraction process is incorrect, and I strongly disagree with it.”

Emails released to me under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from Stockholm University show that Mei very clearly opposed the retraction.

“I absolutely not (sic) accept this retraction,” she wrote in an email to her co-author on 1 February 2022, just days before Jiang formally lodged his request for retraction with the journal.

Mei stands by her study’s findings and hoped they could be used to produce better, safer vaccines. “We demonstrated that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein manifests some disadvantages that must be solved before it becomes a vaccine,” she said.

A retraction notice published in May 2022 cited concerns about the construction of the spike plasmid and the use of a GFP reporter system, rendering the paper unreliable to scientists or commentators wishing to reference or build upon Jiang and Mei’s findings.

However, Mei strongly refutes these concerns, telling me that they are “unfounded and the retraction is unjustified.”

“I strongly disagree [with the retraction notice], because the experiments have a control sample: Nucleoprotein containing 6Histag and GFP report, which localizes in the cell plasmid rather than in the nucleus. Therefore, the notice contains incorrect information.” For this reason, said Mei, “I never signed the retraction notice.”

Emails between the authors, Stockholm University and MDPI reveal that this was a highly unusual retraction, pushed through in a climate of intense public pressure and with scant scientific justification.

The email records show that first author Hui Jiang initially requested the retraction of his paper, in a ‘generic’ letter emailed to MDPI on 9 November 2021.

However, the journal pushed back due to lack of evidence of scientific error in the study, and questions over whether the retraction request was motivated by public pressure.

“We have checked your retraction request… and feel the information provided is insufficient,” wrote MDPI Publishing Manager Donna Virlan on 22 November.

MDPI Assistant Editor Gloria Gao reiterated the lack of scientific justification. “At the moment, the Committee and editors have seen no evidence, and all we hear is that there is some publicity,” she wrote on 24 November.

In the same thread, Academic Editor, Dr Oliver Schildgen, who initially approved Jiang and Mei’s paper for publication, described the retraction letter as “rather generic.”

“For me it was not clear if the public pressure or scientific faults were the cause for the requests,” he said, but “we have to be neutral as scientists.”

Pressure from academic activism and ‘fact checkers’

“I do not care about Twitter shitstorms,” wrote Schildgen, above.

Others, like German scientist Dr Götz Schuck, cared a lot.

“The publicity surrounding this publication is unusually high,” and “is instrumentalized as a source of misinformation,” complained Schuck in the first of multiple emails to the journal. He states that he separately contacted Umeå University with his complaints.

He urged the journal to bypass normal retraction processes and immediately withdraw the paper because “unusual times call for unusual measures.”

In a follow up email the next day, this time with Stockholm University included, Schuck catastrophised over the “scientific scandal” of the paper remaining online with nearly half a million downloads, urging the journal to “remove the article in question as quickly as possible.”

“You can’t just rely on a scientific investigation of the case. Every day they hesitate enables further dissemination of misinformation related to this publication,” wrote Schuck on 23 November 2022.

Schildgen replied assuring that correct procedures were being followed, and recommending that any further issues be raised with the Chief Editor (NIH scientist Dr Eric Freed), to whom he formally handed over the case.

However, Schuck was not placated. He emailed a third time, alleging that MDPI had been “hacked by anti-vaccinationists” and criticising the journal for seeking a scientific explanation for retraction without taking “social relevance” into account.

In a reply to Schuck, Prof Neus Visa, Head of the Wenner-Gren Institute where Hui Jiang worked, assured Schuck that “the authors of the article are working on their reply to the journal.” She immediately forwarded the exchange to her counterpart at Umeå University, Anders Sjöstedt, who replied ‘thanks.’

There may well have been more communications of the type sent by Schuck directed towards MDPI, Stockholm University and Umeå University. My FOIA email request only captured emails sent to Hui Jiang between 1 Jan 2022 – 1 June 2022 and to Neus Visa between 01 November 2021 – 16 December 2021.

Additionally, Stockholm University fielded several requests from fact checking organisations about the paper, including Lead Stories and Correctiv.2

Getting the retraction over the line ‘did not require evidence of scientific misconduct’

By early December, the journal was still unsatisfied with the explanations offered for Jiang’s retraction request, but concessions from Stockholm University and NIH scientist and MDPI Chief Editor Eric Freed got it over the line.

On 2 December 2022, Visa advised the editors,

“I am writing to confirm that Hui Jiang is employed as a research engineer at our department and that he carried out the published studies without approval for lab’s resources and reagents.”

When I asked Mei about the use of resources in her study with Jiang, she countered that her lab “provided most chemicals, antibodies, plasmids, and the publication fee,” so any Stockholm University resources used in Jiang’s work for the study would have been minimal, even negligible.

However, even if Visa’s statement stood, this alone would not normally warrant a retraction.

Schildgen said as much, suggesting that a correction may be the most appropriate action because, despite the publicity, “critical science is to be published.”

“While I agree that the usage of ressources (sic) should have been properly acknowledged and should be subject to a correction, my main question to all of you is if there is substantial scientific misconduct, is there any proof that the data were falsified?” he replied.

“As I also receive requests and queries from public media meanwhile, this is urgent now,” he wrote, suggesting that in the three and a half weeks since Jiang had first requested his retraction, neither the author or the university had managed to provide any convincing evidence of a scientific justification for it.

Then, Freed stepped in to suggest that the retraction could be completed without evidence of scientific misconduct (more about Freed shortly).

“Just to add one important point: retraction of a paper does not require evidence of scientific misconduct. If the data are considered to be unreliable, if honest mistakes were made, etc., such that the conclusions are not valid, the paper should be retracted,” wrote Freed on 2 December.

On 6 December, Visa confirmed that though the university does not have any proof that the data were falsified, “the authors have revealed deviations from good research practice that should be sufficient to justify an immediate retraction of the article, as pointed out by Dr. Freed.”

And with that, the fate of the Jiang and Mei paper was sealed, despite Mei’s protestations.

“I have to express my surprise about the entire history of this process,” said Schildgen.

On 22 December 2021, an expression of concern written by Freed and Schildgen was published in the journal. It states, “One of the authors has raised concerns regarding the methodology employed in the study, the conclusions drawn and the insufficient consideration of laboratory staff and resources,” advising that an “in depth investigation” has been initiated.

On 10 May 2022, the paper was formally retracted, with a notice published in MDPI alleging “improper experimental design with the potential to significantly affect the integrity of the resultant experimental data.”

Hui Jiang’s retraction request

Under FOIA, I was able to obtain a copy of Jiang’s letter requesting retraction of his paper, which he emailed to the journal on 9 November 2021. This is the letter that MDPI Academic Editor Oliver Schildgen described as “rather generic.”

The letter has Mei’s name at the bottom. I asked if she consented to this, and she replied, “Yes. It was forced to do that (sic). Stockholm University issued an order. We were asked to submit the letter within 48 hours before checking the lab book and experiment protocols.”

However, after reviewing the lab books and protocols, Mei strongly opposed the retraction, and never signed the final formal retraction request.

In his letter, Jiang listed six reasons for requesting retraction. These need unpacking. There was no one better for me to ask than anonymous science blogger and whistleblower, Dr Ah Kahn Syed (aka, Arkmedic), whose earlier commentary on this scandal, along with independent journalist John Davidson, provided the ground work for my part in this two-years long collaborative investigation.

Following, Jiang’s reasons for retraction are dissected with commentary from Arkmedic.

1. “I am a research engineer belong to Dr. Nelson Gekara group in Stockholm University. About this publication, I privately collaborated with Dr. Ya-fang Mei from Umeå University and did not inform my supervisor Nelson Gekara.”Arkmedic: Failure to inform the supervisor of a research protocol is not a reason for retraction. Individual research experiments are conducted often without the supervisor being aware of them and in this case the supervising author on the study (Ya-Fang Mei) was the de facto supervisor.
2. “Many of the experiments in this publication were done using Gekara lab’s resources or reagents without authorization.”Arkmedic: The funding for these experiments and most of the lab reagents were provided by the supervising author (YFM). Gekara’s lab was already adequately funded for DNA signalling work from a Swedish government grant of which this work would easily qualify as related.

   *RB note: Additionally, Mei asserts that her lab “provided most chemicals, antibodies, plasmids, and the publication fee.”

3. “The data in this publication haven’t been conducted to the highest scientific standard and the results are not properly interpreted.”Arkmedic: It is ridiculous that a first author would say that his/her own work was not conducted to the highest scientific standard. The interpretation of the results as described in the paper was correct. Interpretation of results beyond that described in the paper is not a reason for retraction.
4. “We have not properly acknowledged.”Arkmedic: Who was not properly acknowledged? The funding of the study was properly documented. Lack of acknowledgement is not a reason for retraction of a paper.
5. “Some phrases in the text are identical to Nelson Gekara’ publications.”Arkmedic: Which phrases? Which publications? It is expected that the same group re-use protocols from prior studies, in which the wording of such would be the same. In this case the authors used the COMET assay which they have described in a prior paper by Jiang and Gekara. Reuse of protocol descriptions from the same group are not a reason for retraction.
6. “The statements or descriptions in this publication based on artificial cells and systems have been misled readers and have bad effects.”Arkmedic: The paper clearly described the use of HEK293 cells which were also the cell lines used by Pfizer-BioNtech in their preclinical studies for the mRNA vaccine. It was an entirely appropriate cell line to use for this purpose. External misinterpretations of the ramifications of a study are not a reason for retraction.

The final published retraction notice makes no mention of most of the above listed concerns, including, conspicuously, Jiang’s claim that he plagiarised, which is a serious accusation.

This suggests that Jiang was unable to produce evidence to support most of his reasons for retraction, which in turn gives the impression that the author of this letter (whoever wrote it) was clutching at straws to manufacture reasons to achieve a predetermined result: getting the paper retracted.

Implications for cancer and immune suppression

The significance of the retraction of Jiang and Mei’s paper being undermined with an expression of concern (December 2021) and then retraction (May 2022) during a period of time when billions of people were continuing to receive Covid vaccine injections is immense, says Arkmedic.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here rebekahbarnett.com

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