Good morning from Chicago! We will start Day 3 (last day) of the 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication. @peerreviewcongress.bsky.social / peerreviewcongress.org/peer-review-… #PRC10 <— This hashtag will give you all the posts! You can also click on this feed, created by @retropz.bsky.social: bsky.app/profile/did:…
Continue reading “Peer Review Congress Chicago – Day 3”Category: Pre-publication peer review
Peer Review Congress Chicago – Day 2
Good morning from Chicago, where we are getting ready for Day 2 of the 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication. peerreviewcongress.org / @peerreviewcongress.bsky.social / #PRC10
Share this:
Peer Review Congress Chicago – Day 1
It’s Peer Review Week! A perfect time to post my notes from the 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, which was held at the Swissôtel in Chicago, two weeks ago, September 3-5, 2025.
This was my first time attending this congress. I tried to live-post all the talks on BlueSky [except for one session where I sneaked out].
You can find most posts about this conference under the hashtag #PRC10 on BlueSky or X. Andrew Porter @retropz.bsky.social, Research Integrity and Training Adviser at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, created a BlueSky feed as well.
This post will contain (lightly edited) notes from Day 1. Click here to see the posts from [Day 2] and [Day 3].
Continue reading “Peer Review Congress Chicago – Day 1”Share this:
Preprint claiming that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause transcriptomic dysregulation is deeply flawed
Today, 25 July 2025, a preprint was posted claiming that significant gene expression changes were found in individuals with new-onset cancer and other diseases after receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, compared to healthy individuals.
A preprint is a non-peer reviewed manuscript – a study or hypothesis that has not yet been evaluated by other scientists. These articles should always be read with caution. Preprints can be brilliant, misguided, or completely bonkers – but they have not been peer-reviewed.
So let’s take a closer look at this preprint.
Update, 12 September 2025: The preprint was withdrawn for “unresolved ethical issues concerning ethical oversight, legitimacy of institutional boards, validity of the study design, and potential biases in study interpretation that compromise the overall trust in the research findings.“
Continue reading “Preprint claiming that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause transcriptomic dysregulation is deeply flawed”Share this:
SARS-CoV-2 in Barcelona sewers
A quick post based on a Twitter thread I did this afternoon.
Several people asked me to say something about a rather fantastical finding, that SARS-CoV-2 might already have been lurking in Barcelona sewers in March 2019, a year before the first COVID-19 case was reported in Spain.
It was reported by a group from University of Barcelona and posted as a non-peer reviewed preprint on MedRxiv on June 13.
With fantastic claims should come fantastic data. That is not the case here.
Let’s dive into the Barcelona sewers to find out the details.
Continue reading “SARS-CoV-2 in Barcelona sewers”Share this:
Thoughts on the Prevent Senior study
A new study from Brazil is reporting significant positive effects of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) + azithromycin (AZM) on early-stage suspected COVID19 cases. The study was posted as a preliminary manuscript draft on Dropbox a couple of days ago. I just tweeted my thoughts in a long thread, but here is a bit more polished version.
Update 20 April: It was announced today that the study described below has been suspended because of ethical violations. As pointed out by Natalia Pasternak and Carlos Orsi and Ricardo Parolin Schnekenberg (see Additional Reading links below), the study had already started before the ethical approval had been obtained. This could be figured out by looking at the disclosed study days in the preprint and the trial registration at the Clinical Trials website.
Continue reading “Thoughts on the Prevent Senior study”Share this:
An observational study without a control group
This blog post is based on a Twitter thread I did on March 27, 2020, after seeing Mathieu Rebeaud’s Tweet about a new white paper from the institute of Didier Raoult. That not-yet peer reviewed paper describes a group of 80 COVID-19 patients, all treated with a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. This treatment had shown some promising results in a very small, not well-executed study by the same group. Unfortunately, this second study does not have a control group and the patients did not appear to be very sick. So here is my critical review.
Continue reading “An observational study without a control group”
Science Integrity Digest 