Research showing high levels of plasmid DNA in Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and SV40 promoter-enhancer sequences is peer-reviewed, published, and on PubMed...this is what they want retracted
As we've been told from the beginning..."follow the science"...well...Here are the facts!!!
Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. - Romans 5:3-5
Simple Summary of our Publication
Here’s a simple video summary of our publication, designed to help the general public understand the significance of this important work.
Executive Summary
Too Much Leftover DNA Breaks Safety Rules: Tests showed all Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines had way more leftover DNA than allowed (over FDA/WHO’s 10 ng per dose limit). Pfizer doses were 36-153 times over, Moderna 112-627 times, meaning billions of DNA pieces per shot. Old rules don’t fit because this DNA is wrapped in fatty particles (LNPs), making it riskier for health.
Cancer-Linked DNA Part in Pfizer Vaccines: A piece of DNA called SV40 promoter (0.25-23.72 ng/dose) was found only in Pfizer shots, not Moderna. This raises alarms as it is targeted to enter the nucleus, cause mutations, and may promote tumours by blocking a cancer-fighting protein (P53).
DNA is Shielded and Easily Enters Cells: The DNA resists breakdown because it’s protected within LNPs, which boost cell entry by 10-100 times. This could mean longer-lasting DNA and higher risks not covered by current safety rules.
DNA Tests Underestimate Amounts, Some Over Limits: qPCR found Moderna under limits, but 2 of 6 Pfizer batches were over the 10 ng/dose limit for SV40 (twice the limit). qPCR misses small DNA bits, so total DNA is likely much higher.
Possible Link to Side Effects: Higher DNA levels might be tied to reported problems, including serious ones in VAERS. In Canadian data, 58% of issues were severe. This needs more research, as extra DNA could raise long-term risks like cancer from DNA integrating into genes. VAERS typically reports short-term data and there’s no way of telling the batch sizes distributed. More research is needed to determine the actual cause of adverse events, if synthetic plasmid DNA is actually inserted into the genome, and what short-term and long-term risks are associated with this extra DNA, and its effect on the immunological function, given the adjuvant-like properties.
Batch Differences Call for Better Rules: DNA levels varied greatly between and within batches, especially Pfizer, hinting at production issues. Regulators require clearer methods for measuring DNA using multiple redundant tests (e.g. qPCR assays to multiple plasmid sites) to ensure accurate safety checks.
Background
Crazy how time flies. I’ve been struggling to get this out since the manuscript was first published on September 6, 2025. So much to keep up on, and it’s taken way too long to get out. I can’t keep up with how quickly Kevin McKernan and Jessica Rose publish Substack articles. As RetractionWatch has just published a second hit piece on this manuscript, I documented the history and importance of the work in case it gets scrubbed. This journey has been more tears than sweat (literally), but as my son told me the night before our preprint was released in 2023, “Daddy, if this work will help save lives, it’s worth doing.” I hope this Substack provides insight, education, and encouragement on many levels. It’s been a long journey, from when I held my last full-time job to this manuscript being published. It’s a heavy-hitting piece that will hopefully make a difference in the world. I christened this manuscript “The Hammer”.
My challenging personal and professional journey over the past 5 years prepared me to answer the international call to confirm the initial findings of genomics expert Kevin McKernan. In April 2023, Kevin McKernan altered the world to high levels of plasmid DNA and SV40 promoter-enhancer nuclear localisation sequences in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. The SV40 promoter-enhancer were not disclosed to the health regulators upon application for approval. Unsurprisingly, Kevin’s work was met with pushback on multiple issues: the sample size, possible lab contamination, etc. Our response was to conduct an independent study using vials obtained from pharmacies in Ontario, Canada, with Kevin’s PCR assay and Qubit methodology. This resulted in a pre-print that was released publicly on October 19, 2023 and was followed 6 hours later by an Epoch Times article stating that “Health Canada Confirms Undisclosed Presence of DNA Sequence in Pfizer Shot”.
As of November 25, 2025, this pre-print has been viewed 238,308 times and downloaded 23,208 times. It was also instrumental in the Florida State Surgeon General Dr Joseph Lapado’s January 2024 call to halt the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. However, we were always accused of this not being solid science and only a “pre-print”. This published manuscript expanded from the initial 27 vials in the preprint to 32 vials (Pfizer: 10 vials, 6 lots; Moderna: 22 vials, 10 lots), dropped the Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) analysis, and was submitted for publication. The paper was submitted to 3 different MDPI journals. Despite editors promising a fair review, each rejected it without sending it to peer reviewers. We experience a very similar response from Cureus. It became painfully clear just how deeply Big Pharma has captured scientific journals. I was then approached by Dr Panagis Polykretis, Guest Advisor, for a special edition in Autoimmunity called “Autoimmune Inflammatory Reactions Following Genetic Vaccination”, where the manuscript went through a rigorous peer-review process and received an impartial final decision from the Editor-in-Chief of the journal.
The manuscript is now indexed on PubMed.
Full Citation
Speicher, D. J., Rose, J., & McKernan, K. (2025). Quantification of residual plasmid DNA and SV40 promoter-enhancer sequences in Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna modRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Ontario, Canada. Autoimmunity, 58(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/08916934.2025.2551517
Why is it so important that this manuscript is now peer-reviewed, published, and on PubMed?
To make a significant impact in court cases and government hearings, research findings have traditionally been held to the standard of going through the peer-review editorial process before being accepted as scientifically reliable in court and legislative procedures. Preprints, substacks and social media posts do not carry any weight. Some manuscripts, like Kämmerer et al. were peer-reviewed but do not have a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), and carry less scientific weight. The other main peer-reviewed publications include both Brigitte König and Stefanie Kaiser. The ongoing König vs Kaiser debate was covered in our publication. While many thought that our manuscript would never be published in a PubMed-indexed journal due to how captured the journals are, this was so important that we didn’t give up despite many trying to scrub the DNA contamination story.
Replication trumps publication, and our results have been replicated globally.
The chart shows all the studies that have tested the residual DNA in COVID-19 vaccines, and comes from a Google sheet maintained by Kenji Fujikawa.
Even high school students working under FDA supervisory personnel on the FDA campus tested Pfizer vaccine vials and found that the DNA present exceeded the FDA-mandated regulatory limits. This work further supports our and other researchers’ findings of the same and validates our work in the most ironic of experimental circumstances.
This confirms that plasmid-gate must be true.
Therefore, we can be certain that there is residual plasmid DNA in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, with all Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines having an SV40 promoter-enhancer nuclear localisation sequence in their plasmid.
Research Team and Contributions
Dr David Speicher - as the lead on this research project, I tested all the vials, did the analysis, wrote most of the manuscript, and handled the peer review and manuscript proofs. To date, I have tested 44 vials from Canada (this study), Australia, and Ireland.
Dr Jessica Rose - did all the VAERS analysis, reviewed the data, proofread the manuscript before publication, and has been the spokesperson for this work.
Kevin McKernan - designed the PCR assays and provided the qPCR and Qubit® reagents free of charge, performed the Oxford Nanopore (ONT) and DNase I-XT experiments, reviewed the data, and helped write the manuscript. Kevin was a huge help in responding to the reviewer’s comments and reviewing the proofs for accuracy.
Acknowledgements
Dr Maria Gutschi - this work would not have been possible without the help of Maria. Maria invited me to join the project and asked me to test the vaccine vials. Maria obtained the vials for this study from various pharmacies…sort of like Jyn Erso in Star Wars: Rogue One. She also helped with the regulatory aspects of the manuscript.
Dr David Wiseman - was involved early on in this research, provided insight and editorial advice, and performed the PRR analysis that was not used in the published version.
The following acknowledgements section was in the manuscript proof, but for unknown reasons is not in the published manuscript. Dr Maria Gutschi has been a close friend and colleague over the past few years, and I am extremely grateful for all her support.
What do we know about the plasmids?
Synthetic plasmid DNA is present in all COVID-19 mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
The DNA is fragmented (average: 214bp, longest found: 3.5kb). The regulatory guidelines state that DNA fragments in vaccines should ot exceed 200bp.
The Pfizer vaccines contain SV40 promoter-enhancer sequences that were not disclosed to the regulatory authorities when they applied for EUA. These same sequences are bioactive, have been used to integrate DNA fragments into cellular genomic DNA for decades.
High levels of plasmid DNA are in the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to serve as an adjuvant. Dr Robert Malone put out a Substack about this yesterday, but he’s about 8 months behind. In April 2025, Dr Maria Gutschi published a Substack asking (1) if the mRNA vaccines are actually DNA vaccines, and (2) is the fragmented DNA, specifically the SV40 promoter-enhancer acting as an adjuvant. Maria points out that the SV40 promoter-enhancer could promote more antigen production as it contains multiple CpG dinucleotides. Dr Siguna Mueller also has a paper under review on this exact topic.
Interviews and Presentations
Substacks
The news of publication was put out on several substacks, including Jessica Rose, Maryanne Demasi, and Nicolas Hulscher, each sharing their own perspective and worth checking out.
Guest Advisor of Autoimmunity
Dr. Panagis Polykretis highlighted the significance of our work and how he invited us to submit to the article to the Special Issue by Autoimmunity that he served as Guest Advisor for, titled “Autoimmune Inflammatory Reactions Following Genetic Vaccination”. He clearly stated that our article “underwent a thorough peer-review process and received an impartial final decision from the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. Consequently, I am honored to have played a role in the formal publication of this critically important paper.”
Sadly, following the publication of our manuscript and the beginning of the offensive attack by Retraction Watch, this special issue was terminated and scrubbed from the internet. We knew then that we were over the target…more on this below and in the next post.
Rebel News Press Release
Tamara Ugolini from Rebel News did an excellent press release on our manuscript and coupled it with the parliamentary exchange of questions by Dean Allison MP, who questioned the “mutagenic risks from vial impurities like residual solvents, metals, and elements, alongside LNP components such as polyethene glycol (PEG) and the spectre of complement activation-related pseudoallergy (CARPA).”
Dean Allison’s full exchange can be found here:
https://www.ourcommons.ca/documentviewer/en/45-1/house/sitting-21/hansard
International Calls for a Moratorium on mRNA Vaccines
This research has also been the backbone of several international calls for a moratorium on the mRNA vaccine platform. If you agree with any or all of these, please sign and share them.
Canada - Call2Halt19
Australia - The David Declaration
Europe - NORTH Group
The Hammer has a Global Impact
This manuscript is the biggest publication that I have ever done. While in some ways publishing this science could be considered career suicide, it has also sent shock waves globally. It was published on September 6, 2025 (Saturday) and reached the desk of President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Secretary of Health and Human Services) by September 8, 2025 (Monday).
On September 9, 2025, Senator Ron Johnson entered our manuscript and the DNA contamination issue into the congressional record. Senator Johnson then schooled Jack Scott, MD, on the problems with the mRNA vaccines and the DNA contamination. In the video below, Senator Johnson put our manuscript on the bench.
On September 11, 2025, Jessica, Kevin and I went through the fine details and significance of this newly minted manuscript with Dr Wafik El-Deiry and Dr Charlotte Kuperwasser, who then addressed the issue of DNA contamination and SV40 promoter-enhancer on Day 2 (September 19, 2025) of the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) meeting. This sparked much discussion, and things got spicy when the FDA admitted to Dr Kirk Milhoan that they did not test the vials for DNA contamination and relied on Pfizer and Moderna’s data. Just another instance where our work has highlighted the corruption and fraud being committed.
Since publication, this manuscript ranks #3,443 of over 29 million research articles tracked by Altmetrics (that’s all science manuscripts published and tracked) and is the #1 paper published by Autoimmunity.
Public Presentations
While I am thankful that both Jessica Rose and Kevin McKernan can speak and explain things way better than I can, with them taking most of the public appearances at conferences and podcasts, it has left me feeling a little like a third wheel. However, I am thankful to friends like Dr Janci Lindsay who support my work. I have felt overlooked at times, but I’m not in this for the celebrity status. These shots have caused so many people harm, like Sean Hartman (17 year old who died after his first Pfizer shot just so he can play hockey) and Michael Oesch (received 4 Moderna shots and is now abandoned in a long-term care home), and we must ensure that the scientific truth gets out and that a moratorium is placed on the mRNA platform.
I am thankful to the many who have had the patience to talk with me about my research and these important findings.
Over the next week, I’ll be posting many of those interviews and presentations.
Pushback
It’s no surprise that we are getting tremendous pushback and that RetractionWatch has made two swipes at us as scientists in an attempt to get our manuscript retracted. The big pharma investors, like Kevin Patrick, do not want the facts out that these drug products are neither safe nor effective, and proving the DNA contamination by having it in the peer-reviewed PubMed-indexed published literature is a complete threat to the establishment. We knew this would happen when the manuscript was published, and it’s only a matter of time before we see how low they are willing to go to scrub this work from existence. In my next post, I will publish the second formal complaint that I made to the journal about the unethical and unprofessional behaviour of Referee 1.
Conclusion and Support
I am extremely thankful to the many friends and colleagues across the globe who have supported me and this research. There have been many dark days when I wished that I had never done this research, kept my head down, and kept my job. While there would be money coming in to help feed and clothe my family, I knew that publishing this work was essential. I’m sincerely grateful to all those who have supported us both financially and emotionally.
If you are able and wish to support my research further, there are several options.
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Contact me directly via e-mail: research@davidspeicher.com.
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More about the network of 1,590 + "Thought Police" including Rolf Marschalek, coordinated from Griffith University, who think that mRNA Jabs are better than sliced bread.
They claim to have "reviewed" 180,000 papers after publication.
https://geoffpain.substack.com/p/some-papers-should-be-removed-after
Congratulations on your paper.
And great and deep thanks!
Jan Lakota, Slovakia