MDPI Study is NOT Reliable & Doesn’t Prove Covid Vaccines are “Gene Therapy”
In today’s Medium article I’ll be discussing the impact that an unreliable study via MDPI has published about supposed transcriptase into the nuclei of cells in vitro (👈 in vitro is the start of this paper’s problems). Any biologist can tell you that vaccines CANNOT enter the nucleus of a cell. I have written on this subject before, but this paper published via the MDPI needs debunking. So without further ado, let’s get into the article.
➡️ The MDPI paper
The study [1] is trying to state that the Pfizer vaccine was able to be reverse-transcribed (A reverse transcriptase is an enzyme used to generate complementary DNA from an RNA template, a process termed reverse transcription) [2] and be integrated into the genome of human cells. Being an in vitro study is only the beginning of this paper’s problems. Edward Nirenberg goes into fantastic full-length explanation and detailing each and every bit of that paper which is wrong. [3] The journal itself in my opinion should never have been taken off Bealls List, which shows all predatory publishers (more on that in another section). References:
[1] https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/reverse-transcriptase#:~:text=Reverse%20transcriptase%20(RT)%2C%20also,into%20a%20single%2Dstrand%20DNA.
[3] https://twitter.com/ENirenberg/status/1497377274336743424?t=iXz-NtbbgM0dihCm2Xyhhw&s=19
[4] https://beallslist.net/
➡️ ️Is the paper reliable?
One user from Biology Stackexchange summed it up factually and with detailed scientific evidence to boot [1].
“This paper is NOT reliable. A non-exhaustive list of problems in no particular order:
It’s clear they don’t understand some of the features they discuss, such as LINE1 elements, calling LINE1 “endogenous reverse transcriptase” when they are actually transposons. They also seem to think there is just one LINE1 gene, not understanding that they are present in thousands of copies throughout the genome (having “jumped” into many genes).
It’s clear they don’t understand how to do statistics properly. If you just do more and more comparisons between different experiments, eventually you will find a difference just by chance. To correct for this, you must reduce your significance threshold proportional to the number of comparisons you make. This is called “Bonferroni correction” and there is no evidence they used it. As far as I can tell, after the Bonferroni correction is applied, essentially none of their meaningful comparisons end up being statistically significant.
Their main “control” consists of no vaccine, rather than a dummy/different vaccine. Effects associated with vaccine presence could for example be due to the lipid nanoparticles or modified RNA — that is, they could be non-specific responses.
The fundamental flaw: as a stand-in for human cells, they use only a highly chromosomally abnormal cultured liver cancer cell line Huh-7. According to a description of the line, “The majority of Huh-7 cells show a chromosome number between 55 and 63 (mode 60) and are highly heterogeneous.” (normal cell count is 46) In addition to “…containing many mutations and INDELS, it is worthy to note the Huh7 cells have a point mutation in the p53 gene.”
The LINE1 protein they image likely appears in tumour cell lines (like the Huh-7 line they use), but not in normal cells. From “Methods Mol Biol. 2016; 1400: 261–280. doi: 10.1007/978–1–4939–3372–3_17 “Using immunohistochemistry, we found nearly half of human cancers stain positively for ORF1p, with immunoreactivity in some common cancers approaching 100% of cases. No staining was observed in the cognate normal tissues”
Given they’ve completely misinterpreted the tox data in rats (of course the liver is where this stuff ends up — it’s being dosed intravenously for acute toxicity. They also fail to mention that it’s cleared quickly too”
References: [1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/107418/is-this-pfizer-related-paper-reliable
➡️ What is a predatory publisher?
As explained via Iowa State University, a Predatory publisher is “an opportunistic publishing venue that exploits the academic need to publish but offers little reward for those using their services.” [1] MDPI is quick to release poor peer-reviewed studies in exchange for hardly anything in return for others, which affects the academic reliability of the science journal itself.
References: [1] https://instr.iastate.libguides.com/predatory
➡️ Other MDPI Controversies
MDPI has had ethical/publishing problems since 2013 [1] after MDPI journal “Cancer” was caught up in a sting operation and the journal had to reject a fake paper, demonstrating how poorly MDPI actually does on peer-reviewing papers. In August 2018 10 senior editors, including the editor-in-chief, of the journal “Nutrients”, owned by MDPI, resigned due to pressure to “accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance”. [2]
In 2021, five members of the editorial board of the journal “Vaccines” resigned after a mediocre quality paper was published that misused data to reach the incorrect conclusion about Covid-19 vaccines [3] [4]. The article has since been retracted illustrating how science properly works.
Something else which was a major worry with MDPI was their fast publishing of scientific papers, MDPI published around 60% of its papers from 2016 to 2019 [5]. As we know it takes a long time to properly peer review a study, especially as it's a rigorous process [6].
So published peer-reviewed studies should take time to go through EVERYTHING. But MDPI publish papers extremely fast, took 68 days to publish a paper in 2016, that jumped to 39 days in 2019 [7], a major cause for concern. In comparison two of the mega journals took more than 200 days on average from submission to publication. [8] This could be cut down, but in science, it’s always good to take time in reviewing information, sources and other aspects.
References: [1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.342.6154.60
[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/open-access-editors-resign-after-alleged-pressure-publish-mediocre-papers
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8294615/
[4] https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-quit-journal-board-protesting-grossly-irresponsible-study-claim
[5] https://res.mdpi.com/data/2019_web.pdf
[6] https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/what-is-peer-review-for-a-scientific-paper/
[7] https://res.mdpi.com/data/2019_web.pdf
[8] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/academic-publishing-last-mile-lasts-too-long-christos-petrou/
➡️ Conclusion
Can we trust MDPI in other ways? Of course, we can, but we have to just trust the experts to find any failings or poor information within studies, there are 8.8 million active working scientists and medical professionals globally so for any layman reading this, please leave the data interpretations to experts in their relevant fields and do not listen to people like Dr. McCollough whose voice is from a pseudoscientific minority peddling misinformation, he’s also no public health expert, epidemiologist or virologist, his field it is within the cardiovascular system and nothing more.
💥 Thanks for reading, Lawrence. Please consider a small contribution, in the form of a beer as all articles are created in my small amount of spare time: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/LawrenceRob