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 Preprints can be brilliant, misguided, or completely bonkers – but they have not been peer-reviewed.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Update, 12 September 2025: The preprint was withdrawn for “unresolved ethical issues concerning ethical oversight, legitimacy of institutional boards, validity of the study design, and potential biases in study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.“
Apologies for not posting for a while. Fall 2024 was a busy time for me, with travel to give talks in Australia and Singapore and some events in the US. Instead of trying to catch up with everything that has happened since September, here are some highlights.
Einstein Foundation Award
I’m thrilled to have won the 2024 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. The Einstein Foundation Berlin selects three winners each year. The 2024 winners are:
Early Career Award: Helena Jambor and Christopher Schmied at PixelQuality – Best practices for publishing images. ‘PixelQuality has established guidelines and checklists for publishing clear and reproducible images. It now aims to disseminate and refine them to handle AI-assisted image generation and analysis.’ ‘Research images are the proof of scientific findings, not just visuals. PixelQuality has set new standards for their reproducibility and transparency.’
Institutional Award:PubPeer – ‘PubPeer has become an essential part of the research communication landscape, with over 300,000 comments logged so far. It is estimated that since 2012, 19 percent of all retractions of papers worldwide in all academic domains had a prior discussion on the site. Beyond identifying flaws and fraud, PubPeer functions as an important tool to jointly improve scientific publications through „liquid feedback“.’
Individual Award:Elisabeth Bik – ‘Elisabeth Bik’s work in uncovering manipulated images, fraudulent research data and publications has created enormous impact all over the world. Her work has led to heightened awareness of questionable research practices and generated widespread attention to responsible conduct of research in the scientific community.’
The award ceremony will take place in March 2025 in Berlin, Germany.
The Einstein Foundation Award trophy is a piece of chalk, created by Professor Axel Kufus at the Berlin University of the Arts to honor ‘a basic tool that has been used to bring knowledge into the world for as long as we can remember’. Source: https://award.einsteinfoundation.de/about
The Bik Fund
Instead of accepting the Einstein Foundation award money for myself, I’ve decided to put it into ‘The Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund’ – where I hope to help other science sleuths with small grants for e.g., traveling to conferences, buying equipment or software, or training. Our type of work often does not fit into the hypothesis-driven model of government or charity funds, so I hope to help by filling this funding gap.
It is my hope that we can make this fund grow, so we can help more integrity warriors in the future – donations to the Bik fund are tax-deductible and very welcome.
The book describes how Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University and a fellow image-sleuth, discovered possibly altered images in a highly-cited paper about amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s patients and in other papers connected to the biotech company Cassava Sciences (see also below). It also gives a disturbing insight into the amount of fraud in neuroscience and the lack of action by journals, institutions, and government agencies.
Matthew Schrag and other ‘science sleuths’—Kevin Patrick, Mu Yang, and I—worked for two years checking thousands of papers in Alzheimer’s research and related fields for the book, uncovering a concerning number of potential problems in papers by Sylvain Lesné, Berislav Zlokovic, Eliezer Masliah, and others.
Charles Piller (right) and I at a book signing event for ‘Doctored’ – February 2025 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, CA
Cassava Sciences Phase 3 did not work
I have written in the past (here and here) about problematic images in papers by Dr. Hoau-Yan Wang and Cassava Sciences (NASDAQ: $SAVA), a biotech company testing a drug targeting Alzheimer’s disease. These concerns were first spotted by Matthew Schrag and published in a Citizen Petition, in an attempt to halt Cassava’s clinical trials. Despite the apparent problems, the FDA did not stop Cassava’s clinical trials of their Alzheimer’s drug, Simufilam. But Cassava’s stock dropped significantly, upsetting a lot of investors.
For three years, fans of the $SAVA stock harassed the Dr. Wang critics – including me – claiming that the drug would work fine; that all stockholders would be rich as long as they would HODL; and that all our concerns were FUD. They joined forces in a SAVAges Discord app, where they talked about how one day they would all buy Maseratis, Lamborghinis, and even a SAVA island — and how retarded and fraudulent the SAVA-critics were.
The authorities begged to differ, however. In March 2024, Science reported that FDA inspectors had found many problems in Dr. Wang’s lab, ranging from uncalibrated instruments, lack of control samples, and stored data files, to leaving out outliers based on subjective criteria. Another report by the City University of New York (CUNY) to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), leaked to Science, described ‘egregious misconduct’ in Dr. Wang’s lab. In June last year the Department of Justice announced that Professor Wang had been charged with operating a ‘Multimillion-Dollar Grant Fraud Scheme’.
Meanwhile, lawsuits were filed back-and-forth. Cassava Sciences was suing the people who filed the FDA citizen petition and who set up the website CassavaFraud.com, while stockholders were suing Cassava in a class-action lawsuit for misrepresenting the quality of the experiments performed by Dr. Wang. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Cassava with misrepresenting clinical trials result, and later settled for $40M. And CUNY, instead of officially announcing their misconduct findings, was investigating who leaked their misconduct investigation report to Science.
Finally, last December the biotech company announced that the Phase 3 trial did not meet the anticipated endpoints. In other words, Simufilam did not halt or improve Alzheimer’s disease. The Cassava Sciences stock immediately dropped to $2-3 dollars, and the SAVAges Discord became a valley of despair. No more SAVA island.
Didier Raoult enters the Retraction Watch Leaderboard
As I’ve written previously, many papers from Professor Didier Raoult, the former director of the IHU Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, France, are problematic.
Some appear to contain manipulated images, while others describe research conducted without proper ethical permits. A number of Raoult’s studies were performed on vulnerable populations, such as homeless people, or on study participants in the Global South, which I [gasp!] dared to label neocolonial science.
As described in this paper by Fabrice Frank et al, the IHU-MI produced a set of 248 studies all with the same IRB approval number, 09–022. Despite sharing the same permit, the publications varied in terms of sample type, demographics, and countries. Other ‘multi-use’ IRB numbers were found too. Typically, an IRB approves one particular study, and researchers are not allowed to reuse this permit for other, unrelated, studies. Dr. Raoult appears to have cared little for such rules, however.
After raising our concerns on PubPeer and social media, and also writing to journal editors, several journals have started to issue Expressions of Concern and retractions.
In fact, Raoult has now earned so many retractions (32 as of today) that he has entered the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. The most significant of them is the retraction of the paper that claimed that Hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. I criticized this paper in my blog post in April 2020, days after its publication. It took more than four years to get it retracted.
With over 600 of his papers on PubPeer and 225 EoCs, it seems safe to assume that for Raoult’s position on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard list, the only way is up.
The European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences continues to be a safe space for paper mills and very low-quality articles. Its special December issue (Supplement 6) is filled with 16 papers, all written by the same author, who appears to be using the journal as one big advertisement for his MAGI supplement-selling business. No conflicts of interest to declare!
A parody (modified image; yes, I occasionally photoshop as well!) I made based on the cover of Stephen King’s novel “It”, about a monster lurking in New England sewers. Not meant as copyright infringement. You can buy the book here.
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.
Surgisphere is a company that specializes in the analysis of clinical data. It provided the large datasets on COVID-19 patients that formed the basis of two papers recently published in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, both of which were retracted on June 4th. Suspicions had been raised about the validity of the data, provided by Surgisphere founder Sapan S. Desai (archived ResearchGate page) who was an author on both papers.
But that might not be the only concern about Desai’s work. Here I will discuss a paper from his PhD project at the University of Illinois at Chicago that appears to have some serious image problems.
Last week, a new retrospective study from Tongji Hospital in Wuhan was published in Science China Life Sciences (a Springer Link journal). The study found 47% fatalities in critically ill #COVID19 patients that were given regular treatment, and only 19% fatalities in patients treated with low doses of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).
These results sound amazing.
But I took a closer look. And I have lots of questions.
Recently a paper published in Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, a Mary Liebert publication not to be confused with the more glamorous Nucleic Acid Research journal, was brought to my attention. It described the potential use of small RNAs as a therapeutic against SARS-CoV-2.
Alas, it is most memorable because of the alarmingly short time-to-acceptance, lack of references, and the omission of several conflicts of interest.
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.
The IHU Mediterranee Infection, the Marseille hospital that claims that hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin treatment will cure almost everyone infected with COVID-19 has been reporting very low death rates for COVID-19 patients. As of today, their website reports that the IHU has a much lower death – 1.7% – than the worldwide COVID-19 mortality rate of 6.2%.
While that might look amazing at first glance, these numbers are not surprising, given the high numbers of virus tests that the institute has been performing. Let’s take a closer look at their testing to better understand how the Marseille hospital can get such low mortality rate numbers.
The International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC) has shared concerns about the Gautret et al. paper published in its own journal. This paper, published under senior authorship of Didier Raoult from the IHU-Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, describes a small study that showed remarkable effects of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin treatment in COVID-19 patients.
After world leaders and politicians started to tweet and endorse this study, many people pressured health officials to start treating COVID-19 patients with this regime, although the study was small and not yet confirmed by independent, larger, and better randomized other studies.
Several scientists and medical professionals, including myself, had concerns about how patients were assigned to each treatment group, how PCR results were reported, why patients with a poor outcome had been left out of the final results, and how this treatment could potentially result in serious side effects. I wrote about my concerns in this blogpost and on PubPeer.
Now, ISAC, who is overseeing the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, the journal that published this study, has joined in those concerns.
Science Integrity Digest 