BREAKING: The drama is not over for my original myocarditis study

Published online January 27, 2024 - now being asked to respond to 52 points of contention made by reviewers POST PUBLICATION, by March 26, 2025.

Ok. I don’t even know what to say about this. Talk about non-precedence. I have been an academic my entire adult life and have many peer-reviewed articles under my belt. I have written about the process before, and if you’ve read my writings on the peer-review process, you’ll have learned that it’s pretty awful. It’s long, it’s rigorous, it costs money and it is majorly fatiguing. Once you get that final “acceptance” note however, it’s over, and you have a beautiful and enhanced (thanks to the hard work of reviewers and journal editors) piece of work that everyone can read - well, as long as its open access.

So after the first saga of my myocarditis paper being “withdrawn” (for summary from Retraction Watch, go here) without clear reason, I spent 2 years in a bit of a lull with respect to trying to resubmit the work but eventually, I did. Peter McCullough and I (the original authors), updated the work to conform to the more recent data in VAERS and Peter recruited Nicolas Hulscher to aid in getting the paper submitted for review, and to go through the eventual dreaded peer review process. Eventually, after many rejections, it got accepted with revisions to Sage journal Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety. We made the revisions as per the reviewers’ helpful comments and suggestions, and eventually it was accepted and first published online on January 27, 2024.

I must say, after everything I went though with this work - which indeed has absolutely non-controversial findings - it was a little anticlimactic. It was so long after I had written up the original analysis, and so many more people (including young people) had been put at unnecessary risk of myocarditis (and other AEs) having been given these injections.

But, anticlimactic as it was, it was published, and that’s the main thing, I suppose. At least now, I thought, the information therein could be read, and the paper could be useful.

Think again Jess. Today I got an email from the Research Integrity Editor (she/her/hers) entitled: Post Publication Review of your article DOI: 10.1177/20420986241226566. The date is Wednesday February 26, 2025. This date marks a full year after it was first published online.

Now, my first thought was that this is the product of a little trick used post publication by trolls. The trick is they write bad reviews on published papers with the intention to question the paper’s findings with the subsequent intent of removal from the eyes of readers. This trick has been used time and time again in the context of “controversial” papers - especially since 2021 - and is an ongoing problem that quite frankly, makes the entire peer review seem pointless. Here is the “expression of concern” letter written by one such troll patrol, after the paper was published wherein the following was written:

The Editor and the publisher were alerted to potential issues with the research methodology and conclusions and author conflicts of interest. Sage has contacted the authors of this article on this matter, and an investigation is underway.

So an “investigation” has been “underway”.

Remember, these papers have already been through the peer review process and have already been scrutinized by many peers, and journal editors.

To question a published paper and to run it through an investigation gauntlet like this, is to question ALL OF THOSE PEOPLE’S JUDGEMENT AND WORK ETHIC, not to mention the capabilities of the authors, and I must say, something I never encountered in all of my years of going through this process.

But this was not quite that. The results of this “investigation” contained in this email are the suggested corrections from 2 reviewers: “Reviewer 1” and “Reviewer 2”, with a grand total of 52 additional post-publication points of correction (29 and 23, for reviewers 1 and 2, respectively). We have been instructed to “acknowledge” the email by March 4, 2025, and do “a major revision” of the article in a point-by-point manner by March 26, 2025.

They have NOW completed their review? NOW? What choo talkin’ ‘bout Willis?

I think what they have actually done is responded to the whining of troll patrol, done a post-publication re-review (an “investigation”), and are discrediting us and themselves by demanding that we submit to a thorough re-review more than 1 year after the publication fact.

This is not how the peer-review process works, at least, it never has been in the past. You cannot re-review an already accepted and published paper based on post-publication “complaints/whining/musings” and expect the authors to re-write it to this degree (52 detailed points?!) after a year has passed.

My faith in these journals is completely gone. There’s no reason for this request from the “Research Integrity Editor”, except - EXCEPT - if this is an attempt to purge the paper once again from the eyes of the public and I must reiterate, this is NOT the standard.

If the paper indeed had so many points of concerns, and indeed now has a 52-point list of “major revisions” that are required as per the “comments made by the reviewers”, then these should have been addressed when it was going through the peer review process. Not a year later.

Confounded. I honestly can only speculate as to why this is happening now. It feels to me that this email has been “on hold” for deployment at a specific point in time to make noise. And no, I don’t know why. But yes, I am speculating.