Tag: health

Is science self-correcting? Not in this Elsevier journal.

Around 2014-2015, I screened 20,000 biomedical articles for image duplication in 2014-2015. About 4% of those papers, 782 to be exact, contained inappropriate duplications. Together with my coauthors Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, I published that work in mBio in 2016 here.

Unfortunately, many of these problematic papers are still not addressed by the journals now, ten years later, even though the concerns in some of them are far beyond what could be blamed on an innocent error. Two of those examples were published in Cytokine, a journal that seems to care little about the problematic papers they published in the past.

Continue reading “Is science self-correcting? Not in this Elsevier journal.”

COVID-19-vaccine-induced eye damage? Reused images, impossible demographics, and an incomplete ethics approval number

A 2025 paper published in Ophthalmic Epidemiology is being promoted online as proof that COVID-19 vaccines damage the eyes. Before accepting that conclusion, it was worth looking at the paper itself.

A closer look at the article revealed a reused figure published by another group of authors, 59 men plus 69 women in a study of 64 participants, no control group, and an ethics approval number that seems generic and incomplete.

Continue reading “COVID-19-vaccine-induced eye damage? Reused images, impossible demographics, and an incomplete ethics approval number”

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 Preprints can be brilliant, misguided, or completely bonkers – but they have not been peer-reviewed.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Update, 12 September 2025: The preprint was withdrawn for “unresolved ethical issues concerning ethical oversight, legitimacy of institutional boards, validity of the study design, and potential biases in study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”