Study on cancer risk from Covid vaccination censored

Science is only free as long as it discovers nothing that contradicts economic interests.

Thomas Oysmüller, tkp.at (German)

That is why a study from October 2021 on cancer and Covid vaccination disappeared. A two-year investigation shows how a piece of scientific research had to be withdrawn and never appeared.

The research concerned the potential of Covid vaccines to cause cancer. The results were not supposed to reach the public, and the censorship was enforced “in violation of academic ethics”, says the author of the paper.

Power and science

Journalist Rebekah Barnett, who uncovered the scandal, sums up:

“The scandal, involving Stockholm University, the renowned scientific publisher MDPI and a senior official at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has serious implications for scientific integrity and global cancer risk – especially for women.”

The story begins in October 2021. At that time, an important scientific paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal MDPI Viruses, highlighting that the spike protein of both the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the associated vaccines* damages important DNA repair pathways.

Barnett recounts:

The study caused a great stir because of its implications for immunosuppression and cancers arising from repeated exposure to Covid infections and vaccinations. The authors’ findings have since been confirmed in other peer-reviewed scientific studies, but in the highly political climate of the time they were new and controversial.

The study was then quickly retracted under strange circumstances, with the lead author requesting the retraction of her own paper. Stranger still, the same editor who had approved the study for publication made a U-turn and approved its retraction. There was speculation that Jiang had been pressured into requesting the retraction in order to cover up evidence of the harmfulness of Covid vaccination.

Now one of the study’s authors says that this was indeed the case. The paper, entitled “SARS-CoV-2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro”, was written by Dr Hui Jiang of Stockholm University and Dr Ya-Fang Mei of Umeå University. In an email exchange, Mei told me that Stockholm University put pressure on Jiang to request the retraction of the paper, and that she herself never agreed to the retraction.

“Stockholm University initially decided to retract the paper without the authors’ consent, which is a clear violation of academic ethics,” she said.

“Stockholm University asked the first author, Hui Jiang, to retract the paper and began to formalise the process. This is an illegal retraction. I told the editors that the procedure for retracting the publication is not correct, and I strongly object to it.” Emails provided to me by Stockholm University in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that Dr Mei clearly opposed the retraction: “I absolutely do not accept this retraction,” she wrote in an email to her co-author on 1 February 2022, just days before Jiang officially submitted her request for retraction to the journal. Mei stands by the results of her study and hopes that they can be used to produce better, safer vaccines. “We have shown that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has some drawbacks that need to be resolved before it becomes a vaccine,” she said.

A retraction notice published in May 2022 raised concerns about the construction of the spike plasmid and the use of a GFP reporter system, making the paper unreliable for scientists or commentators wishing to cite or build on Jiang and Mei’s results. Mei, however, firmly rejects these concerns and tells me that they are unfounded and that the retraction is not justified.

“I strongly disagree [with the retraction], because the experiments have a control sample: nucleoprotein with 6His-tag and GFP reporter, which is localised in the cell plasmid and not in the nucleus. The notice therefore contains false information.” For this reason, says Dr Mei, “I never signed the retraction notice”.

Emails between the authors, Stockholm University and MDPI show that this was a highly unusual retraction, pushed through under strong public pressure and with hardly any scientific justification. Barnett then describes in detail, backed by evidence, how this was enforced. A vivid piece of investigative research into the “freedom of science” and what happens to research findings that collide with the interests of capital and power.

Original article on tkp.at (German)

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