Anatomy of a Retraction

Executive Summary

This OpEd presents the details behind the recent retraction of our paper “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19” by Elsevier/Toxicology Reports (TR). Our paper was part of a TR Special Issue on the COVID-19 pandemic and focused on 1) the myriad toxic effects of the COVID-19 “vaccines” on the host, 2) the inadequacy of the clinical trials used to show these “vaccines” were safe, and 3) the poor cost-benefit of using these “vaccines”.

Our paper was submitted to the Elsevier journal TR in Summer 2021, underwent a rigorous independent peer review, was accepted for publication, and went online in mid-September 2021. Our article (and the other articles in the TR Special Issue) was then subjected to a unilateral re-review commissioned by the publisher Elsevier in late Fall, 2021. This re-review was managed/reviewed by an Elsevier contractor and also included an anonymous reviewer of unknown independence and expertise. The review comments were sent to the first author (myself) by Elsevier, and a response to these comments was requested. Both the official reviewers’ comments and my official response are contained verbatim in the Appendix, which is the highlight of this OpEd. This exchange of comments was used by Elsevier to justify the retraction of our article.

As the reader will see, the reviewers’ comments were of extremely poor quality. In the one area where the review manager had any expertise (toxicology, the main thrust of our paper), the reviewers offered no comments. The only comments they offered were on topics where they exhibited little, if any, expertise, explaining in part the reason for the extremely poor quality of the review.

Following my response, the Elsevier contractor recommended the article be retracted. Elsevier informed me the article would be retracted based on their contractor’s recommendation, and on 30 April 2022, a retraction notice was posted on the TR Website. Thus, the results of a non-independent non-objective review by an Elsevier contractor over-rode the results from a rigorous independent objective peer review to enable the retraction to occur.

In the interim, on 21 March 2022, the Editor-in-Chief of TR resigned for personal reasons. On the same day that the Editor-in-Chief resigned, the Elsevier contractor who had managed and participated in the re-review, and who had recommended retraction of our paper, was appointed by Elsevier as permanent Editor-in-Chief of TR!

Introduction

The famous quote attributed to Otto Von Bismarck states: “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.” I would add a third item: journal article retractions. This OpEd describes details of the unilateral retraction of our TR article titled “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” by the Dutch publisher Elsevier. In the interests of transparency. I thought it might prove useful to provide all the details of the retraction process so that the reader could decide the credibility of Elsevier’s unilateral decision to retract our paper.

I don’t know how the process used to retract our paper reflects the processes used to retract other papers, since I have not studied the retraction issue, and this is the first paper I’ve had retracted. One paper retracted relatively recently with which I have some familiarity was authored by Drs. Jessica Rose and Peter McCullough. The paper was titled “A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products.”  It was peer-reviewed and passed with flying colors. The accepted paper was then published in the Elsevier journal Current Problems in Cardiology on 1 October 2021 and unilaterally withdrawn by the journal a couple of weeks later. The only explanation given for the withdrawal by Elsevier was “the journal is not willing to publish the paper“.

In our case, the peer-reviewed TR paper was accepted for publication and posted on the TR Website (as part of a TR Special Issue on the COVID-19 Pandemic). Elsevier decided unilaterally to conduct a re-review of all the papers in the TR Special Issue, and based on the re-review, our TR paper was unilaterally retracted on 30 April 2022. During that ~seven-month period of posting, our TR paper achieved an Altimetric ranking of #160/~20,000,000 (the top one-thousandth of a percent), a metric of media impact. I read many hundreds of the Tweets and other media postings on which the Altimetric ranking was based; they were overwhelmingly positive, including strongly supportive statements from many Ph.Ds and M.D.s.

The remainder of this OpEd includes the timeline of events (which in some sense tells the whole sordid story of what actually transpired), and an overview of the main issues addressed in the response to the Elsevier reviewers. The Official Review Comments by Elsevier’s reviewers and my Official Response to those comments are contained verbatim in the Appendix, which is the highlight of this OpEd.

Timeline

Summary of Key Timeline Events

• Mid-July to mid-Sept 2021 – Article rigorously peer-reviewed by independent experts and accepted by TR.
• 14 Sep 2021 – Article available online early-Fall to early-Winter 2021 – Re-review conducted by Elsevier contractor Dr. Lawrence Lash and an anonymous reviewer.
• 28 Feb 2022 – Dr. Ronald Kostoff (First Author) receives official re-review comments from Elsevier and request to respond.
• 10 March 2022 – Dr. Kostoff’s official response to Elsevier’s official comments sent to Elsevier.
• 16 Mar 2022 – Dr. Mihail Grecea (Elsevier) responds with Elsevier decision to retract article.
• 21 Mar 2022 – Dr. Aris Tsatsakis resigns as Editor-in-Chief of TR.
• 21 Mar 2022 – Dr. Lawrence Lash was appointed by Elsevier as permanent Editor-in-Chief of TR.
• 30 Apr 2022 – Retraction notice posted for the article on TR Website.

Expanded Timeline

Our peer-reviewed TR paper was available online on 14 September 2021.

At some point between mid-September and mid-December 2021, Elsevier unilaterally decided to do a re-review of all the papers in the TR Special Issue. The re-review would be managed by Dr. Lawrence Lash, who was the previous Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of TR, and he would be assisted by an “independent expert” for each of the papers in the TR Special Issue.  Dr. Lash was an Elsevier contractor (EIC of another Elsevier journal) and had recently received funding from the NIH, a strong COVID-19 “vaccine” promoter and supporter. We don’t know either the conflicts or the expertise of the “independent expert” assigned to our TR paper, since that person had not been identified. I suspect there are conflicts, for reasons I mention in the Appendix.

On 28 February 2022, I received an email from Dr. Mihail Grecea (Elsevier) containing the Official Review Comments from Elsevier’s re-review of our TR paper on child vaccination and requesting my response to those official comments. On 10 March 2022, I sent Dr. Grecea my official detailed response to the Elsevier comments (shown in Appendix), concluding that none of the issues raised by the reviewers justified in any way retraction of our TR paper or even the re-review of our TR paper that had occurred.

On 16 March 2022, Dr. Grecea responded as follows: “The Founding Editor of the ‘Toxicology Reports’ has reviewed the concerns raised regarding the article and your response and taken the decision to retract the article.” The “Founding Editor” happens to be the Elsevier contractor who managed the review. Usually, a contractor who performs a commissioned review makes recommendations for action based on the review, and the commissioning organization makes a decision based on the contractor’s recommendations.  However, given the low quality of the review (as will be seen by the comments in the Appendix), I can understand Elsevier’s wanting to distance itself as much as possible from the stated decision.

On 21 March 2022, the TR EIC (Dr. Tsatsakis) resigned as EIC for personal reasons, and later that same day, Dr. Lash was appointed the permanent EIC for TR. I cannot emphasize this last point too strongly. Dr. Lash, an Elsevier contractor, conducted the re-review at Elsevier’s request, and then was rewarded with the permanent TR EIC position on the same day that the TR EIC resigned. This is how Elsevier follows the COPE Guidelines on Ethics and Conflicts-of-Interest?

On 30 April 2022, a notice of retraction was posted on our paper’s TR Website.

Overview of Main Issues Addressed in Response to Reviewers

The initial section of my response to reviewers (shown in the Appendix) addressed 1) the ethics of censoring information that could impact life-or-death COVID-19 vaccination decisions and 2) the myriad conflicts of interest of both the review sponsor (Elsevier) and the reviewers (Dr. Lash and the unnamed “independent expert”). My initial comments also identified the apparent expertise gaps of the Elsevier reviewers on some of the technical areas they chose to address and the low technical quality of the review. Most interestingly, in the technical area where one of the reviewers has demonstrated technical competence (toxicology), and which was the central thrust of our paper, the reviewers offered no comments. All their comments were in technical areas where they demonstrated little, if any, expertise, perhaps explaining one reason for the extremely low technical quality of the final re-review product.

Reviewers’ Main Technical Critiques

The Appendix presents in detail our problems with all the technical critiques the reviewers raised and highlights the low technical quality of the review. In summary, I will address the reviewers’ three key technical critiques from the Appendix.

1. Scope

Our paper focused on the detailed toxicology issues associated with the COVID-19 “vaccines” and is a perfect fit with both TR (toxicology) and the Special Issue (COVID-19 Pandemic). Yet, the lead technical comment from each reviewer in the Appendix was that our paper was not within the scope of TR.

Dr. Lash’s inability to recognize/admit the perfect match between the theme of our article and the TR Special Issue should have disqualified his participation in the remainder of the review!

2. Terminology

The Elsevier reviewers objected to our use of the term “inoculation” instead of “vaccination”. We used the term “inoculation” rather than “vaccine” in the TR paper because the substance does not meet the legal definition of a vaccine, nor does it function as a vaccine (prevent infection, prevent viral transmission). In fact, present data from the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and many other countries show that after six months post-inoculation, the “vaccine” recipient enters the stage of negative effectiveness and becomes more vulnerable to COVID-19 infection than the “unvaccinated”. What kind of protection is that?

The reviewers state that our use of the terms “diverges from common use and are incorrect”. That’s an opinion, not a technical argument. Nowhere do they offer technical reasons showing why the statement is incorrect and why this substance should be called a vaccine. That’s not a mystery; credible evidence of the injected substance acting as a COVID-19 “vaccine” does not exist!

3. Attribution of Cause of Death to COVID-19

The Elsevier reviewers claim we misinterpreted CDC data that showed comorbidities accompanying each death attributed to COVID-19. As shown in the Appendix, the CDC essentially admitted that only ~5% of the deaths could be uniquely attributed to COVID-19. For the remainder of the deaths, “there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death”. Thus, the attribution of deaths to anyone cause (where multiple potential causes were present) was completely arbitrary.

Additionally, what the re-reviewers failed to mention was that for each hospital patient who could 1) be tagged with COVID-19 by a flawed PCR test and 2) placed on a ventilator, the hospital received a payment of $100,000 (or more) from the government (in the USA). Thus, in a death attribution process that was completely arbitrary for ~95% of the deaths attributed to COVID-19, there was a very strong financial incentive to classify deaths in this ~95% group as due to COVID-19.

In summary, based on a highly conflicted re-review process that produced a product of extremely low technical quality, Elsevier has made a unilateral decision to retract a highly acclaimed paper. We believe this will deprive the public of credible information needed to make a well-reasoned and informed decision on whether to “vaccinate” themselves (and especially their children) against COVID-19. The review product also reflects poorly on Elsevier, in terms of blindly accepting technically flawed recommendations from at least one, and possibly two, highly conflicted reviewers.

Originally published by Trial Site News, May 1, 2022