I have long lamented a blind spot among my fellow physicians and scientists, a problem that the COVID-19 pandemic has made even more painfully apparent to me. Our inability as a group to recognize when science is being distorted and weaponized is what I am referring to. This is not a new technique, but it has been used more frequently and intensely than ever before. I will cite the first part of the thread that reminded me of this.
McCullough just published a paper in “Food and Chemical Toxicology” that posits biological mechanisms underlying purported innate immune suppression and harm from SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination, using VAERs to support their hypotheses of vaccine relatedness of noted pathologies.
— Prof Jeffrey S Morris (@jsm2334) April 21, 2022
This long review article presents many details about various biological pathways, but their links to mRNA vaccines are almost wholly speculative. In some cases, they link to other vaccines, old mRNA technology, or COVID-19 infection, but are not directly linked to mRNA vaccines.
— Prof Jeffrey S Morris (@jsm2334) April 21, 2022
Antivaxxers have spread this study far and wide as evidence that the vaccine against COVID-19 is dangerous.
Please tell me how to sue and how to get a lawyer before I die. I was 100% documented healthy and now I have an issue in almost every system in my body. My eyes can no longer focus, my brain is vibrating 24hrs a day, and I can no longer work or exercise.
— We The US People (@WeTheUSPeople) April 23, 2022
mRNA vaccines promote sustained synthesis of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
The spike protein is neurotoxic, and it impairs DNA repair mechanisms.
Suppression of type I interferon responses results in impaired innate immunity.https://t.co/236jClq43r
— Dr. Lynn Fynn (Fan Account) (@fynn_fan) April 17, 2022
Dear Helen u weren’t the premier who relentlessly pushed this dangerous injecticide down our throats. A lot of citizens are suffering ma’am. Time to pull the plug I think.
Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of… https://t.co/c9kP1r38aM
— Sagezza (@sagezza2) April 21, 2022
I could list many more of them, as well as the study being shared this way on Facebook with similar messaging that the study shows that the vaccine is dangerous and that large numbers of people are being harmed by it. Is it proof of anything? I think you have the answer. It is a prime example of what I now refer to as misinformation by scientific review article. It appears to have all the trappings of science, but its speculation goes far beyond what the science will support, all in the service of promoting a certain narrative and providing what seems to be scientific support for a pseudoscientific conspiracy theory. It worked, as shown by its social media engagement.
It is also true that Prof. Morris nailed it in the fourth post. The article is almost entirely speculative. He missed observing that the article is speculative in a deceptive manner that I have seen many times before, in the Hannah Poling story in 2008, in which antivaxxers tried to rebrand autism. Other examples include Yehuda Shoenfeld's ASIA and the idea of MIP. Think of this review as a Gish gallop. There are lots of claims, all speculative, many for which the cited evidence is at best tenuous and often requires quite the leap to go from what the evidence finds about a process and how that process might be related to COVID-19 vaccine.
It is an exercise in dumpster diving into the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System ( VAERS ) database in a manner similar to how Tracy Beth Heg and other COVID-19 contrarians did for myocarditis last summer. The weaponization of VAERS reports has been a constant since the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines.
The last name is important. Why? The paper that was written by Seneff has been going around. She was an antivaxxer before the Pandemic who blamed vaccines and Genetically modified organisms for the disease, so it's not surprising that she pivoted to being anti-COVID-19 vaccines. She has no expertise in vaccines, infectious disease, public health, epidemiology, or any other related disciplines. She is a computer scientist at MIT, but she only has an undergraduate biophysics degree from the late 1960s. In addition to promoting antivaccine misinformation, she has made a number of off base statements over the last several years, including her prediction that half of all children born in the year 2025. It's 2022, now. How would that prediction work out? She once claimed that GMOs can cause concussions.
We met Peter McCullough before. He is a cardiologist who has been promoting a narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are causing aholocaust for over a year now. He promoted ivermectin as a miracle cure. Dr. McCullough has become a major force in promoting COVID-19 pseudoscience and is frequently on the speaker's list for denial rallies and events.
I didn't recall having heard of the other two authors, but I was interested in them. Greg Nigh is affiliated with a health care company. Surprise! Surprise! The clinic is called Immersion Health.
Immersion Health opened its doors in 2014. Dr. Greg Nigh and Maria Zilka, the clinic’s founders, have collaborated on cancer treatment for 10 years. Immersion Health brings them together to offer intensive, comprehensive and individualized programs for the treatment of all types and stages of cancer. In addition to cancer care, Dr. Nigh offers the full range of primary care medicine, including functional lab testing and genetic polymorphism analysis.
Immersion Health was started as an intensive naturopathic oncology clinic. Dr. Nigh develops comprehensive and intensive treatment programs for all types and stages of cancer.
The cancer treatment approach at Immersion Health is unique, recognizing cancer as a metabolic disease. At Immersion Health we are delivering therapies that address all aspects of health and vitality, because long-term success against cancer depends on a strong immune system, low inflammation, ongoing detoxification, lifelong nutritional strategies, stress management, physical activity and much more. Immersion Health brings this all together into individualized treatment plans that optimize every individual’s potential for recovery and ongoing wellness.
Naturopathy is a form of medicine. This is a great place to look for many, many examples. Naturopaths have moved to COVID-19 quackery. Anthony Kyriakopoulous has the closest to what one might consider actual qualifications, working at the Nasco AD Biotech.Lab, a lab in Greece described as a private research laboratory focusing on the discovery, development and thereafter clinical application of patented Medicinal.
Defending authors like these would be called an attack. It is not, really. It could be an ad hominem attack if the only reason I gave for their paper being wrong was because it was written by them, but you know me better than that. My response is always the same: Qualifications matter. The author's history matters. All but one of the authors are not qualified to write a review article like this, and the one who does have some qualifications is not the first author or the corresponding author. That tells me a lot about what I'm about to read.
This is a lengthy article. Unlike Prof. Morris, I'm going to approach it more from the angle of disinformation and its similarities to previous papers like it before the epidemic, rather than getting into the weeds of each and every claim. Prof. Morris was correct that the paper is speculative and doesn't cite a lot of primary evidence, but that is a hallmark of many prior antivax narratives that try to postulate a biological mechanism. The paper does a VAERS dumpster dive to lend credibility to its speculation.
When I first read the paper, I didn't recall seeing a figure at the beginning of the review. Let's take a look.
It looks very scientific, doesn't it?
Let's compare the written abstract with the actual one.
The mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were brought to market in response to the public health crises of Covid-19. The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease has no precedent. The many alterations in the vaccine mRNA hide the mRNA from cellular defenses and promote a longer biological half-life and high production of spike protein. However, the immune response to the vaccine is very different from that to a SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this paper, we present evidence that vaccination induces a profound impairment in type I interferonsignaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health. Immune cells that have taken up the vaccine nanoparticles release into circulation large numbers of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites. We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances potentially have a causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell’s palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, impaired DNA damage response and tumorigenesis. We show evidence from the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis. We believe a comprehensive risk/benefit assessment of the mRNA vaccines questions them as positive contributors to public health.
I will concede that the immune response to the vaccine is different than the immune response to an infection, but not in the way described in this paper that implies that it is worse. The authors claim that the mRNA vaccine causes a set of biological events that are different from those caused by infections and are counter productive to both short- and long-term immune competence and normal cellular function.
A preprint has revealed a remarkable difference between the characteristics of the immune response to an infection with SARS-CoV-2 as compared with the immune response to an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 (Ivanova et al., 2021).
Where is that link going? Go back to this review article. Just click on the link if you don't believe me and think that I altered the link. The paper is a preprint from August and it shows a good thing about the vaccine.
In COVID-19 patients, immune responses were characterized by a highly augmented interferon response which was largely absent in vaccine recipients. Increased interferon signaling likely contributed to the dramatic upregulation of cytotoxic genes in the peripheral T cells and innate- like lymphocytes observed in COVID-19 patients. Analysis of B and T cell repertoires revealed that while the majority of clonal lymphocytes in COVID-19 patients were effector cells, in vaccine recipients clonal expansion was primarily restricted to circulating memory cells. Taken together, our analysis of immune responses to the mRNA vaccine reveals that despite the lack of dramatic inflammation observed during infection, the vaccine elicits a robust adaptive immune response.
The Seneff et al also claim.
All of these observations are consistent with the idea that the anti-COVID-19 vaccines actively suppress type I IFN signaling, as we will discuss below.
It is consistent with the vaccines not stimulating type I IFN signaling and the inflammation that comes with it, which is a good thing. It is what you want from a vaccine, a robust immune response that doesn't come with all the inflammation caused by the infection but still produces memory cells that can be reactivated by contact with the provoking antigen. The main issue is that actual infections are. It stimulates the immune response as the virus is replicating freely and damaging cells, thus leading to inflammation, both specific to the infection and nonspecific. The vaccine causes muscle cells to make the spike proteins that allows the virus to enter them. That is the target of the immune response. The immune response to more viral proteins would be expected.
The introduction is full of additional misrepresentations.
Since long-term pre-clinical and Phase I safety trials were combined with Phase II trials, then phase II and III trials were combined (Kwok, 2021); and since even those were terminated early and placebo arms given the injections, we look to the pharmacosurveillance system and published reports for safety signals. In doing so, we find that that evidence is not encouraging. The biological response to mRNA vaccination as it is currently employed is demonstrably not similar to natural infection. In this paper we will illustrate those differences, and we will describe the immunological and pathological processes we expect are being initiated by mRNA vaccination. We will connect these underlying physiological effects with both realized and yet-to-be-observed morbidities. We anticipate that implementation of booster vaccinations on a wide scale will amplify all of these problems.
This is a misrepresentation of what I wrote about a year ago. The placebo arm of the large clinical trials carried out by Pfizer and Moderna for their vaccines did not have a way to guarantee that subjects would not get vaccine. The EUA had been issued and doctors and the government were doing everything they could to encourage people to get the vaccine. The ethical thing to do was unblinding the trials, even if it complicated the long term safety monitoring. It was unethical to keep the vaccine out of the placebo group even after it was proven to be effective and safe. This is an issue that antivaxxers and those who enable them have long distorted, so it's not surprising that Seneff et al are doing it as well.
They also parrot a number of common anti-COVID-19 vaccine talking points that I have discussed here and at my not-so-super-secret other blog.
The mRNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have been viewed as an essential aspect of our efforts to control the spread of COVID-19. Countries around the globe have been aggressively promoting massive vaccination programs with the hope that such efforts might finally curtail the ongoing pandemic and restore normalcy. Governments are reticent to consider the possibility that these injections might cause harm in unexpected ways, and especially that such harm might even surpass the benefits achieved in protection from severe disease. It is now clear that the antibodies induced by the vaccines fade in as little as 3–10 weeks after the second dose (Shrotri et al., 2021), such that people are being advised to seek booster shots at regular intervals (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021b). It has also become apparent that rapidly emerging variants such as the Delta and now the Omicron strain are showing resistance to the antibodies induced by the vaccines, through mutations in the spike protein (Yahi et al., 2021). Furthermore, it has become clear that the vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease, but can only be claimed to reduce symptom severity (Kampf, 2021a). A study comparing vaccination rates with COVID-19 infection rates across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States in early September 2021, found no correlation between the two, suggesting that these vaccines do not protect from spread of the disease (Subramanian and Kumar, 2947). Regarding symptom severity, even this aspect is beginning to be in doubt, as demonstrated by an outbreak in an Israeli hospital that led to the death of five fully vaccinated hospital patients (Shitrit et al., 2021). Similarly, Brosh-Nissimov et al. (2021) reported that 34/152 (22%) of fully vaccinated patients among 17 Israeli hospitals died of COVID-19.
Even though evidence is showing that natural immunity fades as well, the appeal to it is not above all. The rise of the very variant that can evade prior immunity shows that natural immunity can be bypassed by the virus. Any immunologist knows that antibody levels don't stay high forever after a vaccine. If that were the case, our blood would become a mucus of high levels of antibodies to the previously encountered antigens that the immune system had responded to. The development of memory cells, which can be quickly reactivated to produce antibodies when the immune system encounters an object again, matter more. In this case, the vaccine doesn't work because it's less than 100% safety and efficacy. The vaccines are less good at preventing disease and death than they are at preventing transmission. It doesn't look good when the evidence cited for the claim that thevaccines don't prevent transmission is risibly awful.
The rest of the paper reminds me of a time when I and a friend of mine were in junior high. It probably won't surprise readers that I was a science nerd even at that tender age. There were times when my friend and I wondered if there was a link between this idea and other ideas, and if genetic engineering was possible.
A lot of this paper reminds me of those days, when I would string ideas together without much in the way of good evidence, and ask what if. The paper seems to have applied a lot of scientific findings to the same sort of speculative flights of fancy. The authors try to claim that suppressing IFN responses can lead to cancer.
Both IFN-α and IRF9 are also apparently necessary for the cancer-preventative properties of a fully functional BRCA2 gene. In a study presented as an abstract at the First AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Basic Cancer Research, Mittal and Chaudhuri (2009) describe a set of experiments which show for the first time that BRCA2 expression leads to increased IFN-α production and augments the signal transduction pathway resulting in the complexing of IRF9, STAT1 and STAT2 described previously. Two years prior, Buckley et al. (2007) had established that BRCA1 in combination with IFN-γ promotes type I IFNs and subsequent production of IRF7, STAT1, and STAT2. Thus, the exceedingly important cancer regulatory genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 rely on IRF7 and IRF9, respectively, to carry out their protective effects. Rasmussen et al. (2021) reviewed compelling evidence that deficiencies of either IRF7 or IRF9 lead to significantly greater risk of severe COVID-19 illness. Importantly, they also note that evidence suggests type I IFNs play a singularly important role in protective immunity against COVID-19 illness, a role that is shared by multiple cytokines in most other viral illnesses including influenza.
Being a breast cancer surgeon, I know a lot about the functions of the two genes. Seneff et al cite a 13 year old abstract about IFN production. I would have asked where the paper was published. It should have found its way into the scientific literature by now, given that it is a 13 year old finding. The results from the two authors who published the abstract about BRCA2 never made it into a full paper, according to a quick search of PubMed. Even if they had, the abstract showed that the BRCA2 tumor suppressor was needed for breast cells. The finding is irrelevant to COVID-19 vaccines. If the result held up, it would show that the need for BRCA2 in breast cells is related to the cancer suppressing function of the gene. Seneff et al cite a 13 year old abstract to argue that there is a link between BRCA2 deficiency and immune signaling.
Then there is this.
A recent early-release study has found that the mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines is present in germinal centers in secondary lymphoid tissue long after the vaccine is administered, and that it continues to synthesize spike glycoprotein up to at least sixty days post-vaccination (Röltgen et al., 2022). This suggests that immune cells taking up the mRNA in the arm muscle migrate into the lymph system to the lymph nodes, presumably in order to expose B-cells and T-cells to the toxic antigen. The persistence of the mRNA in the lymph nodes and its sustained synthesis of SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein reflect the clever engineering involved in the mRNA technology, as described above.
Imagine that! The immune response is stimulated by the antigen sticking around in the lysies. How terrible!
The paper is filled with odd citations about biological processes, many unrelated to vaccination or infection, all in the service of trying to convince you that COVID-19 vaccines cause harm. The authors invoke codon usage, fear mongering, and even use the term spike to describe it. There are mentions of metabolism and exosomes, as well as the fact that I have some expertise in this area. I'm going to quote Prof. Morris instead of going through them all.
This very long review article presents many details about various biological pathways, most related to cancer, but their links to mRNA vaccines are almost wholly speculative. In some cases, they link to other vaccines, old mRNA technology, or COVID-19 infection, but are not directly linked to mRNA vaccines.
In fact, so much of their evidence is from papers on severe COVID-19 infections, not vaccination, much of the evidence in this article might be better suited to a paper pointing out potential downstream dangers of severe COVID-19 infections than on trying to raise alarm about mRNA vaccination.
A number of places in the article seem to make stronger statements linking mRNA vaccines to some of these processes, but they self-cite a previous review article by senior author McCullough and do not reference any primary biological research making these connections.
They suggest connections of these mechanisms to various anecdotal case reports for herpes zoster reactivation, liver damage, optic neuropathy, T cell lymphoma progression, Hepatitis C reactivation, events not yet confirmed to be related to mRNA vaccination.
The paper amounts to laying out a series of hypotheses about mechanisms of harm that may come from mRNA vaccines. Hypothesis generation is a valuable exercise, including in this context of understanding downstream biological effects of vaccination that might induce harm.
However, not all hypotheses are equally supported. Some are well-girded in direct evidence from relevant studies, while others are more speculative and extrapolate principles from other settings, e.g. SARS-CoV-2 infections or other injected vaccines, as done here.
Prof. Morris is too kind. I wouldn't put it that way. The scientific equivalent of what the kids like to call shitposting is a bunch of low quality provocative assertions on social media. The intended reaction is disgust and fear of the vaccines. Prof. Morris is correct when he says that the purpose of this torrent of speculation is to shift the burden of proof to scientists and their proposed harms, rather than presenting anything resembling actual compelling evidence.
Challenging public health institutions to disprove the assertions made by this article, rather than taking responsibility to validate them or urge other scientists to do so, is a bold move. This type of statement in which one makes a claim and presumes it should assumed true unless other scientists can disprove it, is the classic “shifting the burden of truth” trick. A scientist proposing a hypothesis has the burden of validating it; it is not the responsibility of the scientific community to disprove it, and the hypothesized claim certainly does not have the benefit of presumption of truth unless disproven. This is a common tactic used by many during the pandemic.
A torrent of claims is made in this review article. I have been told that it is not possible to gallop in a paper because one has the time to read and address every claim. That's why I'm trying to point out how similar previous efforts are to this one.
The purpose of a paper like this is to put a seemingly scientific gloss on speculative scientific bafflegab in which the various concepts are at least six degrees of separation away from any biological framework. Scientists with the necessary expertise know that this handwaving is not real, but those without the necessary expertise don't. Doctors and scientists without specialized expertise won't recognize it for what it is.
Seneff et al try to make all their speculation sound plausible by appealing to VAERS.
The easiest thing for me to do is to quote the Tweets. Seneff attributes inflammation to Table I.
One nerve inflammation symptom is anosmia. They claim this “clearly demonstrates” the spike injected into arm reached the olfactory nerve, ignoring that anosmia is common with COVID-19 but not linked to vaccine, and could be caused by previous COVID-19 infection, not vaccine. pic.twitter.com/M7WBiENxI3
— Prof Jeffrey S Morris (@jsm2334) April 21, 2022
Indeed. There is no known mechanism by which the tiny amounts of spike protein that make it into the bloodstream after vaccination could cause anosmia, which is a well-known symptom of COVID-19 infection. There is a lot of evidence that the cells in the olfactory bulb are responsible for anosmia. If the vaccine causes a symptom of the virus, it would be anosmia.
This passage from the review should tell you everything you need to know about it. I was laughing out loud when I read it.
There were nearly 100,000 cases of nausea or vomiting, which are common symptoms of vagus nerve stimulation or damage (Babic and Browning, 2014). 14,701 cases of syncope linked to COVID-19 vaccines represented 96.3% of all cases of syncope, a well-established feature of vagus nerve dysfunction (Fenton et al., 2000).
The vaccine must have hurt the vagus nerve because people passed out after it. I can only laugh. A lot of people faint after blood draws or shots; it is a common reaction in certain populations. It's the same claim that antivaxxers made about the vaccine, that many teenage girls faint after receiving it, except that they at least had a more plausible mechanism than that the vaccine messed up the vagus nerve. Don't get me wrong. The vagus nerve can be affected by stimulation. That's why they call it a reaction. In general, it is pain or fear that results in that stimulation.
I'll mention this one since I'm a cancer doctor.
The authors admit it.
Cancer is a disease generally understood to take months or, more commonly, years to progress from an initial malignant transformation in a cell to development of a clinically recognized condition. Since VAERS reports of adverse events are happening primarily within the first month or even the first few days after vaccination (Rose, 2021), it seems likely that the acceleration of cancer progression following vaccines would be a difficult signal to recognize. Furthermore, most people do not expect cancer to be an adverse event that could be caused by a vaccine, and hence they fail to enter a report when cancer develops shortly after vaccination.
They should have stopped there.
However, as we have outlined in our paper, if the mRNA vaccinations are leading to widespread dysregulation of oncogene controls, cell cycle regulation, and apoptosis, then VAERS reports should reflect an increase in reports of cancer, relative to the other vaccines, even if the numbers are small. The experiment demonstrating impairment of DNA repair mechanisms by SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in an in vitro study provides compelling evidence that the vaccines could accelerate the rate of DNA mutations, increasing cancer risk (Jiang and Mei, 2021).
Seneff et al were correct at the beginning. Cancer is the culmination of a process that takes years from the initial insult that resulted in cellular transformation to the development of a cancer tumor that can be detected by symptoms, physical exam, or screening tests. The increased risk of cancer from radiation exposure from an atomic bomb is too long for this to make sense, as I discussed before, when antivaxxers tried to blame cancer on COVID-19 vaccines. It takes about two years before the earliest signals can be seen for leukemias. The vaccines have only been widely available for a little over a year. The lag time for solid cancers is about 10 years. After 30 years, the risks from radiation from the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were most easily detected. The authors concede that it's too early to detect an increased risk of cancer from COVID-19 vaccines, but then pivot to a hand wave that says, "But look at our mechanisms!"
Prof. Morris did a great job with the VAERS section, but I wanted to focus on the cancer part because I am a cancer surgeon. Since the 1990s, anyone can contribute to the VAERS database as a report of an adverse event after vaccination. The problem has only gotten worse since the Pandemic hit. VAERS is useful as an early warning system, but only if you know how to use it, a skill that involves knowing the base rate of adverse events reported in the population.
I pointed out how bogus scientific articles are a favorite method of spreading antivaccine misinformation. I know antivaccine science denial better than those other forms, which is why I will stick to a couple of examples from the past. Helen Ratajczak published an article in the Journal of Immunotoxicology in 2011. Sharyl Attkisson, an antivax reporter who has now become an all-around conspiracy theorist and COVID-19 denialist, picked up the review article. Those of us who have been following the antivaccine movement for a long time still remember the hilarious spelling of the word.
Ratajczak claimed that the fetal cells used to make vaccines could get into the brain and produce foreign genes. That is it. That is an incredibly implausible idea. The minute amount of human fetal DNA in a vaccine would have to be.
It's not clear whether autoimmunity in the brain or chronic brain inflammation is a cause of autism, and it's not even clear if it's a cause at all. Quite the opposite. Markers of inflammation reported in the brains of children with the condition are not clear if they are a cause or a consequence. On the basis of what we know about human biology, Dr. Ratajczak's hypothesis is incredibly implausible. It is implausible, but not quite homeopathy-level.
Her review listed deficiencies in metal metabolism that were linked to children being exposed to mercury when they were exposed to antivaxxers.
Defective metallothionein might be responsible for the greater amount of blood mercury found in autistic children compared to neurotypical controls (Desoto and Hitlan, 2007; Geier et al., 2010). Metallothionein plays an important role in the development and continued function of the immune response, in neuronal development, and in the detoxification of heavy metals. Many classic symptoms of autism may be explained by a metallothionein defect, including gastrointestinal (GI) tract problems, heightened sensitivity to toxic metals, and abnormal behaviors. Porphyrinuria in children with autism is considered a marker of heavy metal toxicity (Geier and Geier, 2006a; Nataf et al., 2006, 2008; Rossignal, 2007; Geier et al., 2009). Individuals with severe autism had increased mercury-intoxication-associated urinary porphyrins (Geier et al., 2009).
There was no good scientific evidence to support the hypotheses. There are a lot of papers trying to link various metabolism processes to the vaccine. The Hannah Poling case was a huge driver of papers that claimed to show a link between vaccine injury and neurological disorders. The idea was that if a child has a vaccine, it will make them susceptible to brain damage. You know what causes the infections to be more effective. Actual infections! It is highly recommended that children with Mitochondrial diseases receive the full slate of childhood vaccines. Don't even get me started on how vaccines could cause a condition called microcompetition.
Ratajczak discussed a number of non-crank hypotheses with actual science behind them, which distinguishes him from Seneff et al. Apparently, Seneff et al didn't learn from that. The same idea was used to get a review article into the scientific literature to give anti-vaxers talking points that could be used to blame autism on vaccines.
Seneff et al were published in Food and Chemical Toxicology, a journal by a large scientific publishing house. It's the same journal that published an awful study about genetically modified organisms. It is not a journal dedicated to vaccines, infectious disease, epidemiology, or other relevant specialties, so it had no business publishing a review article like this. It's a toxicology journal, but it's not enough to cover adverse reactions from COVID-19 vaccines. One has to wonder why Jose Luis Domingo, who is listed as the editor who handled this review, let it pass and why the peer reviewers didn't reject it.
I think I know why. twofold is the most charitable explanation. Editors want to publish the COVID-19 articles that claim adverse reactions from vaccines. An explanation that doesn't require any sort of conflict of interest is that neither journal editors nor peer reviewers recognize misinformation. They reviewed Seneff et al as though it was a serious attempt at a scientific review, not recognizing the Gish galloping. I have a hard time faulting them for failing to recognize the speculative nature of the claims, the obvious misuse of VAERS, and the even more highlyselective citation of papers that don't. These were not subtle flaws.
In the past, scientists and physicians were unaware of misinformation. No longer. If we don't get our acts together to recognize them, the result will be many more attacks on public health. It's already too late, but maybe the deluge can be reversed and the cranks forced to publish this nonsense in bottom-feeding journals and on their own websites, rather than in Elsevier journals.
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