Not to publish was the advice of the German biochemist Rolf Marschalek to the scientific journal Autoimmunity. The editors had twice asked him to assess a paper for publication as an independent researcher – the so-called peer review.
“Very upset,” Marschalek said when he opened the magazine in September and found that study unchanged. Officially published. He raised the alarm at the website Retraction Watchwhich monitors the scientific integrity of publications.
It’s about one research into the corona vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. The three authors claim that they found more than the maximum permitted amount of DNA fragments, left behind by the production process. The active substance in the vaccines is MRI. The DNA fragments left behind could cause side effects, they say.
But their measuring method is not good. And their own findings show that there is no connection at all, the reviewer writes.
The three examined 32 bottles from 16 production batches of the corona vaccines. Things went wrong right away in the first sub-study. They count the number of side effects reported for each vaccine sample. The American government keeps track of this in the so-called VAERS database. In the sample that caused by far the most side effects, the authors found by far the fewest DNA fragments. In any case, only 3 of the 32 samples are slightly above the maximum standard of 10 nanograms of DNA.
“If I were the author of the paper, I would immediately correct my personal assumption here and stop working on this article. It must be something else that is causing this high number of reported side effects,” Marschalek writes in his report.
A second problem: one of the two methods used to measure DNA, Qubit fluorimetry, has been proven to be unreliable in this situation. This not only stains DNA, but also RNA. It is therefore impossible to detect an amount of 10 nanograms of DNA in a solution containing at least 3,000 times as much RNA (a dose of vaccines contains 30 or 50 micrograms of DNA).
In the first round, Marschalek advises the authors to conduct additional research. For example, not to use that Qubit method. Or, as should be the case, first remove the RNA from the solution before measuring DNA.
In the second round it appears that the authors have hardly changed anything. It strengthens Marschalek in his view that the article is “a ‘mission’ for the ‘anti-vaxx community’.” His advice: get rid of it.
But the publisher decided differently. And the wrongly published information is already being weighed in by the US Centers for Infectious Disease Control CDC’s Vaccination Advisory Committee during meetings on the safety of Covid-19 vaccines.
At the insistence of Retraction Watch, the publisher, Taylor & Francis, placed a pop-up on the offending article stating that it was ‘under investigation’.
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