Pharma-controlled publisher rejects critical study finding plasmid DNA in COVID-19 vaccines after agreeing to peer-review.
12 Days of Substacks: Three MDPI Rejections
“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” While I planned to complete these 12 Days of Substacks by the last day of Christmas (January 5, 2025), things took a little longer than I hoped. However, they will be done by the end of the month to wrap up 2024, and a few others will be published as we launch into 2025.
Olympus has fallen!!! As a scientist, I valued the peer-review process to ensure that published research was scientifically sound. As an author, I value the refining process of a scientific masterpiece. As a reviewer, I took my job seriously and put in the effort needed to ensure that only good science was refined and published. I believe that it is the scientific facts, not the political narrative that matters, and that any research done properly should be peer-reviewed and published. However, I can now conclude that the academic peer review process is indeed broken.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have heard stories of the difficulty in getting anything that opposed the “safe and effective” mantra of the COVID-19 modRNA vaccines past peer review and published. However, I didn’t think the system was that broken. As long as your study followed scientific rigour, there was no reason it wouldn’t be sent out for peer review and publication.
However, over the past four years, there have been several publications that have either been editorially rejected without being sent out for peer review or went through a lengthy and rigorous peer review only to have the journal retract the manuscript, sometimes a year later, due to pushback for publishing “controversial” science. One such example is this manuscript on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
The initial attempts to publish our study on DNA in the COVID vaccines.
After tremendous work, including expanding the sample size to 32 COVID-19 modRNA vaccine vials from Ontario, Canada (10 Pfizer-BioNTech and 22 Moderna), our manuscript was polished and ready for the peer review process. I know that this work is scientifically solid. Even after one year, the only major criticism of the initial manuscript examining 27 vials on OSF Preprints was that we didn’t use RNase A during fluorometry to remove cross-talk from the modRNA. This was easily resolved and the work is ready for critique and publishing.
After performing numerous peer reviews for MDPI over the past six months, I was confident that our work on the presence of residual plasmid DNA and the SV40 promoter-enhancer sequences in the COVID-19 vaccines could be published in an MDPI journal provided the editor would send it out for peer review.
I was confident in this for several reasons:
I have peer-reviewed several manuscripts for MDPI in 2024 and some of them reported on the increase in diseases following COVID-19 infection or vaccination.
MDPI Vaccines has published on the maternal COVID-19 vaccination and the potential impact of neonatal development. However, even this manuscript was subject to criticism and had a correction made on 14 November 2022…1 year post-publication.
MDPI Methods and Protocols is where Brigitte König and Jürgen O. Kirchner’s manuscript on the amount of residual DNA in 7 vials of Pfizer/BioNTech as tested by Qubit® fluorometry was published. Despite several scientific issues with this study, to date, this is the only manuscript on this topic that has passed peer-review and is published in a PubMed-indexed journal.
Many scientists who have given up hope on the traditional peer review process have opted to either publish their work in a low-impact journal or one of several new journals that have emerged to publish counter-narrative studies. Two such journals include the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research and Science, Public Health Policy and the Law. While the latter is where Kammerer’s recent publication on the residual DNA in the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 modRNA vaccine, these journals have a reputation of being “anti-vaccination journals promoting misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines”. The problem with these journals is not that the studies are scientifically sound and peer-reviewed, but when you testify as an expert witness in a court proceeding if your evidence is not from a PubMed-indexed journal it can be easily dismissed irrespective of the scientific merit of the manuscript. Therefore, as our study has tested the most COVID-19 vaccine vials (Both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna monovalent and biovalent vaccines for all variants) it must be published in a PubMed-indexed journal.
Our manuscript was first submitted to MDPI Vaccines on December 1, 2024.
However, four days later, the editor rejected it and did not even send it out for peer review.
Therefore, as I had previously published with MDPI Biomedicines on virus-based cancer immunotherapy and had been invited to join their editorial board, I resubmitted the manuscript to them on December 6, 2024. However, four days later, I received an email identical to that from MDPI Vaccines….editorial rejection without the manuscript being sent for peer review.
At the same time, I was reviewing two manuscripts for Alexandru Pop, Assistant Editor of MDPI’s International Journal of Molecular Science and two others for different MDPI journals. Upon that second rejection, I refused to do any more peer review tasks for MDPI as I was not wasting my time doing free work for a journal when they did not have the respect to send out my manuscript for peer review. I even revoked my application to be an editor for MDPI Biomedicines.
Alexandru Pop responded with the following:
Therefore, I presumed that I had the understanding of an assistant editor and that at least MDPI IJMS would send our manuscript out for peer review. I even sent a copy of the email with my manuscript submission to inform the processing editor that another editor had agreed to send the manuscript for peer review.
Well, even that made no difference and 4 days later I received another editorial rejection without the manuscript even going out for peer review.
I even went back to Alexandru Pop and challenged the journal’s decision and he did go back and investigate, but revealed very little as to why the manuscript was not sent out for peer review.
I responded as follows:
I have not heard anything since. Rest assured we have submitted the manuscript elsewhere, but I will never review or publish with MDPI again and encourage others to beware. I now believe that MDPI editors are nothing more than gatekeepers preventing scientifically sound counter-narrative studies from being published.
Problems with MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute).
The issues with MDP go deeper than editors being gatekeepers against counter-narrative science. I took a little dive into the history of MDPI and some of the problems with the publisher.
MDPI Backs Open Pharma Statement on Open Access
It is no secret that MDPI, like many journals, has close ties with Big Pharma. Many reviewers receive funding from pharma to ensure that their research gets published, the field keeps moving forward, and that opposing science gets squashed.
Like other scientific publishers, MDPI publishes research on the pharmaceutical industry, including studies on drug discovery, sustainability, and the impact of pharmaceutical companies on society. MDPI's research on the pharmaceutical industry is influenced by pharmaceutical companies through research collaborations, business alliances, and transactions. Pharmaceutical companies may sponsor special issues in MDPI journals, where a particular topic relevant to their products or research focus is explored. Companies might also place advertisements for products, events, or services in journals or on publisher platforms. MDPI also I fully support OpenPharma’s statement on open access, especially as pharmaceutical companies are major funders of scientific research and its publication. This doesn’t surprise me, as this collaboration keeps MDPI’s pockets lined. Who wouldn’t like that agreement?
MDPI is more concerned about profit than scientific rigour.
Over the past eight years, MDPI has become one of the largest scientific publishing companies. All their articles are open access (i.e., available to the public to read for free). Incredibly, MDPI surpassed Springer in 2022 and continues to grow.
One reason for the tremendous growth in MDPI is the huge expansion in the number of journals that are published under the MDPI umbrella, and each of the journals run numerous “special issues”. This is a marketing ploy by the company to expand their scope and convince authors that they are contributing to something “special”.
To drive this increasing growth, MDPI continually solicits/email spams researchers for their research. Even today despite the problems with getting out manuscript rejected by MDPI Vaccines, that same journal has the nerve to ask me to submit a manuscript to their journal. Absolute insanity!!!
However, MDPI could not function without aggressively getting researchers to publish with them and paying absurd article processing charges (APCs). For MDPI Vaccines the APC is CHF 2700 (Swiss Francs) (equivalent to 2,978 USD). With the increase in the size of MDPI over the years, in 2021 MDPI’s revenue was ~$324M USD.
MDPI was initially considered a predatory journal, and should still be considered as such.
In 2008 there was a huge push for open-access publishing so that scientific information would no longer sit behind the paywalls of major publishing companies, but be readily available to the public. However, this led to a rise in predatory publishers who resorted to excessive spamming of researchers to pay to publish in their journals that were not indexed on PubMed, Scopus, or Web of Science. This topic went viral with John Bohannon’s publication of the science sting in “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?", which relied on Beall's List of predatory publishers and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to identify predatory publishers. Jeffery Beall, an American Librarian, identified predatory journals as a journal that (i) promise rapid publication, (ii) their homepage targets authors, and (iii) doesn't have clear policies on plagiarism, corrections, or retraction. Beall’s list was hotly disputed among the newly emerging open-access journals with many even threatening legal action. Since then I have relied heavily on Beall’s List and Publons Journal List to avoid submitting my work to a predatory journal.
What does Beall’s list have to do with MDPI? In 2014, MDPI was on Beall’s list due to Beall’s concern that "MDPI's warehouse journals contain hundreds of lightly-reviewed articles that are mainly written and published for promotion and tenure purposes rather than to communicate science." As a researcher, I continually get email spammed from MDPI asking me to publish or review for them. Even after telling the journals that refused to send out my manuscript for peer review that I will never publish or peer review for them again they continue to send me requests.
Conclusion
Some people may see this substack as another researcher complaining about having their manuscript rejected. I am not disappointed in the multiple rejections. Every good scientist has faced their share of manuscript rejections. I am disappointed in how sold-out and broken the system is and that journal editors act as gatekeepers preventing good counter-narrative science from being published. We desperately need a reform in scientific publishing. This will not be a quick fix, but I hope that once RFK Jr. is confirmed as head of HHS this issue will be investigated. Until then, we resubmit to another journal and hope that eventually an editor will have the courage to send it out for peer review.
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It was clear to me that post 2005, journals were selling out to their advertisers (Big Pharma) who were having undue influence on content. I decided to publish in obscure journals, what I fondly call 3rd world journals that were not under the thumb of Big Pharma. When I get criticism it is never about the content I write but the journal I publish in, like I didn't drive the right car or part my hair on the wrong side.
I have watched many claims like this come out over the last ~15 yrs, starting with climate "science". It has been a sickening experience to watch so many institutions that I once trusted and revered, become so obviously corrupted. The worst part is not the corruption itself, rather it is the large number of friends and collegues who cannot (or perhaps will not) see something that is so obvious to me. I feel like the kid in that movie with the sixth sense that can see dead people but no one else sees them. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just crazy, gratefully there are a few other people who see it too, that keeps me going. A decade ago I never would have believed that a majority of the population could be so naive, an ugly awakening it has been for me. I keep doing what I can to try to get others to see it, and try to not be discouraged.