Paper claiming ‘extensive’ harms of COVID-19 vaccines to be retracted – Retraction Watch

A journal is retracting a paper on the purported harms of vaccines against COVID-19 written in part by authors who have had similar work retracted before.

The article, COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign, appeared late last month in Cureus, which used to be a stand-alone journal but is now owned by Springer Nature.(It has appeared frequently in these pages.)

Graham Parker, Director of Publishing and Customer Success at Cureus, told Retraction Watch:

I can confirm we will be retracting it by the end of the week, as we have provided the authors with a deadline to reply and indicate whether they agree or disagree with the retraction.

The senior author on the work was Peter McCullough, a cardiologist at the Institute of Pure and Applied Knowledge who lost his board certification after the American Board of Internal Medicine found he had provided false or inaccurate medical information to the public.

Indeed, McCullough had already lost one paper, in Current Problems in Cardiology, from Elsevier, when he and his colleagues submitted their latest opus to Cureus. And SSRN, which hosts preprints for The Lancet, another Elsevier journal, had removed work by him and colleagues claiming large numbers of deaths from COVID-19 vaccines.

A few days after the paper appeared, we asked John Adler Jr., the editor in chief of Cureus, if the track record of the authors concerned him. His response seemed to admit to the risk, but he also defended the journals vetting of the paper:

Yes I am aware that many of these authors are skeptical zealots when it comes to the dangers of vaccines. Our editorial response was extra vigilance during the peer review process with 8 different reviewers weighing in on publication or not, including a few with strong statistics knowledge. Therefore, a credible peer review process was followed and the chips fell where they may. That is all I can say. If you or other readers were to note fatal flaws in this article now that it is published, i.e. failure to accurately report financial COIs [conflicts of interest], totally erroneous statistical analysis, fake data etc. we will of course re-evaluate at any time.

Adler then took a jab at other journals:

The decision process Cureus made, contrasts sharply with Elseviers seeming editorial decision to just censor the article using ad hominem concerns.

In a Feb. 9, 2024 letter to the journal and the publisher, John P. Moore, a microbiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, and Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health, in New Haven, Conn., expressed their serious concerns about the article. Among their objections:

The authors utterly lack relevant professional qualifications that would enable them to assess the scientific publications they draw on and/or attempt to criticize. The authors self-describe their affiliations under the rubric of Independent Research, or list private foundations, or in one case report an academic discipline unrelated to biology. In short, the authors cannot draw on years of training in biological science, but appear to be self-taught via the University of Google.

They continue:

The point here is that the Cureus review merely regurgitates claims about mRNA vaccines that have circulated on the internet and been debunked over and over again, including by fact-checking organizations (e.g., Factcheck.org, and the USA Today and Politico factcheck teams).

They conclude:

By bringing this highly problematic review to your attention, we hope that you will conduct a thorough review of how it was accepted for publication in Cureus under the Springer Nature imprimatur. How appropriate was the peer review process? How did the editor act? Is the acceptance of this review symptomatic of a wider problem at the journal? Finally, if you share our views that this review is so flawed as to be dangerous to public health, you may well decide that it should be retracted.

Springer Nature had apparently been looking into the case already, and ended up agreeing with Moore, Gonsalves and other critics of the article.

Steve Kirsch, a co-author of the paper, announced the retraction on his Substack over the weekend:

The paper I co-authored with 6 other authors will be retracted by the journal because the publisher wont allow any paper that is counter-narrative to be published.

According to Kirschs post, Springer Natures inquiry found:

a significant number of concerns with your article that in our view cant be remedied with a correction. The concerns include, but are not limited to:

Waving the white flag, a bowed but unbroken Kirsch wrote:

It doesnt do any good to show them these reasons are all bogus. The laundry list of items is simply a placeholder to make it look like the journal is following the science.

Nothing we can say on appeal will make any difference.

The decision was made to retract the paper and facts dont matter. Its about supporting the narrative. When they write in our view cant be remedied with a correction it means dont even bother arguing with us, your paper is retracted.

For his part, Moore said:

The journal and publisher responded courteously and professionally to our letter, and I was pleased by the final outcome. They did what needed to be done.

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Paper claiming 'extensive' harms of COVID-19 vaccines to be retracted - Retraction Watch