DDoS attacks are the old new tactic of censorship/retraction

Oncotarget journal and now Brownstone Institute website are the recent victims of digital flash mobs

Settle in subscribers! This is a long and disturbing article - filled with receipts - and if you’re not aware of the length and breadth and depth of the tentacles that reach into the post-peer-review and publication system, listen up:

Thar’ be sinister saints a’slitherin’ aboot,

Causin’ ‘dem digital swarms.

I thought to tell ye all so much,

To sound yer oon alarms!

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Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

A DDoS attack is basically digitally swarming a site so that no real traffic can get through to it; that digital flash mob of woke morons blocking the entrance to the nightclub of knowledge so nobody important can get in. With these kind of attacks, there is no stealing of data required, and no viruses actually get on your computer. But nonetheless, they are highly effective as massive digital traffic jams.

We’ve now witnessed this happen to the journal Oncotarget, and now it is happening to the Brownstone Institute website. These are focused and targeted attacks on specific sites with the goal of bottlenecking the entryway to information in published articles, to prevent particular information from being accessible to users.

Now what kind of articles would instigate this kind of targeted attack, you ask? How about one co-written by the Associate Dean for Oncologic Sciences at the Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University, who is also the Director of the Cancer Center at Brown University, and the Director of the Joint Program in Cancer Biology at Brown University and its affiliated hospitals, who was also the deputy director of Translational Research at Fox Chase Cancer Center, where he was also co-Leader of the Molecular Therapeutics Program? Or how about one co-written by a distinguished Professor in the Department of Developmental, Molecular, and Chemical Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine and the Director of the Tufts Convergence Laboratory of Biomedical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences?

Wafik El-Deiry and Charlotte Kuperwasser are about as distinguished and experienced as you can get in the science realm: these are not people that trolls and attackers and “science integrity officers” can easily label “grifters” or “anti-vaxxers”. Last week they published an explosive article in the journal Oncotarget entitled: COVID vaccination and post-infection cancer signals: Evaluating patterns and potential biological mechanisms.¹ The paper describes diverse cancer types appearing in temporal association with COVID-19 injection or SARS-2 infection. They did an extensive review of the literature and found:

(1) unusually rapid progression, recurrence, or reactivation of preexisting indolent or controlled disease,

(2) atypical or localized histopathologic findings, including involvement of vaccine injection sites or regional lymph nodes, and

(3) proposed immunologic links between acute infection or vaccination and tumor dormancy, immune escape, or microenvironmental shifts.

They simply concluded with a note of caution in the abstract - they didn’t even call for a moratorium on the COVID-19 shots, which they could easily have done.

These findings underscore the need for rigorous epidemiologic, longitudinal, clinical, histopathological, forensic, and mechanistic studies to assess whether and under what conditions COVID-19 vaccination or infection may be linked with cancer.

But that doesn’t matter to the conflicted attackers. In January 2026, due to this article being published, the Oncotarget server was subjected to [another] cyberattack in the form of a DDoS attack.

N.B. Every screenshot has a link embedded to its source.

As noted in the image above, the suspects of this targeted attack are the Pubpeer Patrol.

Grok made a nice meme that I think is pretty fitting. And yes, I prompted it.

Wafik makes several posts about this recent cyberattack on Oncotarget (which happened because his evidence-rich article was published) and because it implicates the COVID-19 shots in cancer induction. Remember, this is coming from a guy who discovered a p53-activated gene colorfully named WAF1 by WAFik. :) These aren’t small beans.

Let’s look at the paper trail, shall we?

On December 18, 2025, Wafik made the following post on Twitter - this was not the first post he made however, in this context. This is the one he made when the Pubpeer Patrol went after him during the Christmas holidays. I guess they thought he might be AFK enjoying his family rather than responding to the baseless claims of trolls who have nothing better to do. And bear in mind, these attacks have been relentless against him, myself, Kevin McKernan and others.

He followed up with the following comment.

Why all of a sudden 15+ concerns and counting on PubPeer in less than 24 hours during the Christmas break after a year and a half of intensive targeting by PubPeer where nothing other than minor errors were ever found.

There has never been fraud or misconduct ever in my lab but despite that PubPeer and Elisabeth Bik keep selectively targeting me despite being asked to stop.

Raising frivolous concerns about minor errors from decades ago publication is wasteful of time and resources and inappropriate two+ decades after publication.

Whoever is responsible needs to be held accountable for what is in my opinion criminal activity.

The PubPeer network is global (hence including @DHSgov.

) and is undermining the search for scientific truth in the US while destroying reputations and feeding into certain narratives including a reproducibility crisis.

Others online have suggested manipulation of narratives and literature to support certain pharma stocks. I have not seen direct evidence which is why I included @SECGov.

None of this is appropriate, healthy, constructive, or helpful.

This is not the way to reduce or prevent real fraud or misconduct in science, increase public confidence, or help national and local scientific institutions in the US that are in decline.

As I’ve said elsewhere this is destructive of science in part to consistently equate minor errors with fraud and misconduct.

The collateral damage at our universities is huge given recent litigation involving Dana Farber. Sholto David made $2.63 million out of the settlement and I can’t wait to see what universities all across the US implement to prevent similar damages.

Meanwhile careers and reputations are destroyed.

It’s a huge mess, very unfortunate, and wasteful.

He’s 100% correct on all counts and involved the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Securities and Exchange Commission in this post among many other luminaries.

Here’s the kind of slur you’ll find commonly posted in association with the compatriots in the Pubpeer Patrol.

Wafik has been very polite in his responses to one of the more prominent Pubpeer Patrollers, Elisabeth M Bik.

The above was in response to a string of attacks made on Wafik by the Pubpeer Patrollers.

Bik makes the outlandish insinuation that Wafik is an authoritarian figure. This is after she attacked his work, don’t forget. Bik claims to care about “scientific integrity” (checkout Ubiome fraud - Bik was full-on in UBiome from 2016 as its Science Editor - you can read about that in France-Soir’s article), and uses this as her motivation and platform to persistently harass and target specific individuals with specific aims. She’s quite apt at playing the victim, and loves to go on the defensive, despite her vigorous offensiveness and the flock of sub-Pubpeer Patrollers that come to her rescue.

N.B. ScienceGuardians on X have been covering this developing story, and you really should click on the screenshot below to hear this story. There’s a link to the video they made that touches on Bik’s role as a ring-cheerleader. By the way, she also gave one her prizes to Retraction Watch valued at 200,000 Euros. You can’t make this stuff up.

Just last week, I went onto the Pubpeer website to check out just how fast and furiously these mobsters are posting “critiques” (aka: write-ups; aka: fraudulent AI-generated material) of peer-reviewed articles published ONLY in the context of the Oncotarget journal. In a single week, there were 33 write-ups on articles going way back in this journal made by the Pubpeer Patrol, primarily by Pubpeer Patrol Patron Saint of Pretend Pedantics: Actinopolyspora Biskrensis (aka: Kevin Patrick). You can read a bit about him here.

In the following screenshot of my X post on this, “one” refers to Kevin Patrick.

The types of “critiques” that are instigating investigations into PUBLISHED articles - some of them published for decades - with the purpose of having them retracted, are primarily based in the use of a tool cheerled by none other than Elisabeth M Bik. It’s called Imagetwin. Imagetwin is an AI-powered tool that aims to detect image duplicates from pdfs, and was founded by Patrick Starke (CEO) and Markus Zlabinger (CTO) in Vienna, Austria, around 2021. It’s not infallible - as no AI tools are - and it is being abused. Interestingly, the Pubpeer Patrol never aim this high-powered “detector” at their own “works” or other publications that do align with certain narratives. Think: Surgisphere fallout.

Bik, in particular, is effectively nothing more than their cheerleader for Imagetwin. She’s been doing “image analysis” of peer-reviewed papers by hand for a very long time, and now [almost exclusively] over-uses (abuses) this AI tool to selectively “go after” papers - and even journals - that she doesn’t like or agree with. She thinks that she’s creative - mostly because conflicted entities and individuals tell her that she is by referring to her as a “sleuth”, but she’s not doing anyone, or anything, any good. I feel a little bit sorry for her because she will be thrown under the bus one day by her compatriots. That’s why you should never make them bedfellows, Elisabeth. Nobody likes a tattle-tale, especially one that makes up the tales. My feeling is that there’s still an opportunity for you to step away from the dark side. But I digress.

These attacks are not few and far between and like I said, because these “notifications” get sent straight to journal editors as part of the retraction protocol, oftentimes peer-reviewed papers are put under investigation and/or retracted. These Pubpeer Patrol “critiques” are going up every hour - and that’s just the timescale we can see. They are incessant, and every time the Pubpeer Patrol make one of these write-ups, we get crap as shown in the following screenshot in our email inboxes.

Besides email inbox space, this Pubpeer Patrol retraction protocol process takes up a lot of our time. I have an article that’s been published since 2023 and is STILL under attack by this mob. Every now and then the Editor will come back to us and require us to address yet another idiotic (and sometimes just made up - I am NOT kidding) “write-up” from the Pubpeer Patrol about conflicts of interest, for example. Look at the dates in the following images, and remember, these are exactly the types of petty reasons being used persistently by the Pubpeer Patrol to instigate the investigation and retraction of PEER-REVIEWED articles. These petty opinions have nothing to do with problematic content or conclusions generated from the studies under attack - they have only to do with the subject matter.

The editors can indeed refuse to consider these “critiques” as valid because the “critiques”, in fact, almost never change the papers’ conclusions as noted above, but editors and publishers often do not outright refuse to consider these “critiques”, either because of the “pressure” or because they are also part of the network.

Someone should actually calculate the rate of attacks on the Pubpeer website as the number of write-ups per hour; I think the science publishing world would be shocked to find out not only how high that rate is, but how these write-ups only apply to certain individuals → targeted with defamation, harassment and eventual article retraction following years-long investigations and a tremendous waste of our precious time.

Bik plays victim, oftentimes, which is so insincere because she tirelessly injects herself into my own X posts by commenting on them, in spite of the fact that I never tag her. My original post in the screenshot below was about the Stanford Medicine study that acknowledged that myocarditis is a COVID-19 shot-induced adverse event. She antagonistically injected herself onto my thread (that had 123,000 views incidentally) asking if I had read the article while NOT quoting the study itself, but a news article written by Bruce Goldman about one of the authors of the study, Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, the director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute.

And I responded:

She has been going after Wafik quite a bit, as you can see. In the screenshot of the X post below, I set her straight when she claims that it is Wafik who is attacking her.

She also has lovely bedfellows who often make public comments about us, as shown in the following screenshot.

You know what they say about the friends that you keep, right?

This comment was aimed at me by Carl Feagans (blocked) in a thread about Bik and Rolf Marschalek who both - and in entirely separate contexts! - referred to me as “middle author”, instead of using my name. I guess they believe only male authors reserve the right to be addressed using their actual names. That sounds pretty anti-female scientist!

I addressed Bik’s comment about that after she, once again, invited herself onto an X post I made.

Don’t worry folks. The Veg Doc (She/her) came to Bik’s rescue. Phew. No harm, no foul.

Amidst all of these targeted attacks on PEER-REVIEWED journal articles, and in particular, on Wafik El-Deiry personally and professionally (he does not deserve this - none of us do) by the Pubpeer Patrol, it’s interesting to me that Wafik also received a proposal from Pfizer on January 5, 2026. Yes. You read that right!

Here’s the full message from the Pfizer recruiter. By the way, it bears noting here that we, as integral and honest scientists, are fully-transparent about everything going on in our lives and work, and we re-post and report everything so that you guys can see what’s going on in the background. The reason for this is precisely because we are honest.

Dear Wafik,

I hope this message finds you well and enjoying the festive period. I recognize that this time of year often invites reflection, family gatherings, and a well-deserved break from the demands of our professional lives. While I completely respect the importance of such moments, I felt compelled to reach out, particularly given the current landscape of our industry. As we approach the new year, I've noticed a number of seasoned leaders, including yourself, are thoughtfully reassessing their next chapters, and Pfizer is eager to connect with exceptional talents in this pivotal time.

Pfizer is currently navigating a strategic transition as some long-tenured leaders are moving on due to various motivations, whether it be relocation, seeking new challenges, or simply reevaluating their career trajectories. In this context, we are being intentional and selective in our search for leadership talent to steer our innovations and drive meaningful outcomes. Your extensive background in oncologic sciences and your remarkable journey through academia and research truly stand out, making you a compelling fit for our strategic priorities, particularly as we advance our commitment to developing new treatments and personalizing cancer therapy.

What particularly impressed me about your profile was not just your role as Associate Dean at the Warren Alpert Medical School but also your dedication to promoting the careers of younger scientists and your long-term commitment to the American Cancer Society. These attributes align seamlessly with Pfizer's mission to deliver impactful therapies while fostering an environment of growth and mentorship. Your experience could significantly contribute to our innovation agenda and global growth efforts.

I want to emphasize that there’s no pressure or urgency in this outreach, I sincerely see this as an invitation for an open conversation. Should the timing feel right for you, I believe this could be an opportunity to begin the new year with clarity and momentum in a leadership role that truly aligns with your aspirations and values.

If it makes sense, I’d be glad to share a confidential brief on the leadership roles I have in mind for you to consider. I look forward to the possibility of connecting, but of course, only when the moment feels right for you.

Wishing you a wonderful holiday season,

Warm regards,

XXXX
Senior Recruiter
Pfizer

Now, why would Pfizer, at this point in time, want to recruit Wafik?

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Let’s segue now to the Brownstone Institute now, shall we? There’s enough evidence online to implicate the Pubpeer Patrol/Retraction Watch mob/network for anyone to be compelled, if not convinced entirely of their motivations.

On January 6th, 2025, Jeffrey Tucker made a post on X acknowledging the DDoS attack on Oncotarget. Many, many people and organizations posted about this attack. It was, and is, big news.

On January 12th, 2025, Jeffrey Tucker’s Brownstone Institute got DDoSed as well - and it’s ongoing.

Seems odd, no?

What do Oncotarget and Brownstone have in common, I mean besides being DDoSed within a week of each other? Wafik’s article. What does Wafik’s article find: Post-vaccination/infection cancers show rapid progression, atypical patterns, possible immune links; calls for more research. Why would the Pubpeer Patrol launch such stealthy attacks on Wafik? To get his work retracted so people can’t know what he found. Are they responsible for the DDoS attacks? My opinion is, YES - and we will find out for sure and there will be with receipts. What would Pfizer want with Wafik? To buy him out for control purposes. Will Wafik sell out? No. Will Wafik stand down due to Pubpeer Patrol pressure? No.

I want to stress here yet again that the amount of time and energy wasted on countering and responding to these attacks - either directly or through journal editors and publishers - is enormous. This is the point of the attacks: to distract, delay, and wear down their targets so that we eventually give up. The familiarity between this style of derailment and a DDoS attack is not lost on me.

Well you know what? We are not only not going to stop doing research, and publishing our work, but we are going to out you. We have documented everything you’ve done and everything you continue to do. You’re not very saavy when it comes to digital tech, which is awesome for us. You can suppress my views on X all you want, but you know what? It won’t matter, in the end.

Kevin McKernan has etched Wafik’s paper and our own paper onto the Bitcoin blockchain (Block 931003), and our Autoimmunity paper (on the DNA in the COVID-19 vials) has also been entered into the Congressional record by Senator Ron Johnson.

Please check out my own plethora, and well as Kevin’s plethora of articles on Substack documenting these retraction attempts of late by this coordinated mob and please tell at least 1 other person that this is going on in the peer-reviewed literature space.

Ask yourselves: If they have been defaulting to: “That’s not peer-reviewed!”, as a means to pretend like a work is not valid as a reference, then will they not soon default to: “That’s retracted!”, as par for the course instead? Look up retraction rates of peer-reviewed articles since 2010. Or, I’ll do it for you. Check out the rise in 2021. When was it that Bik started cheerleading Imagetwin again? I forget. By the way, she was testing it as early as August 2020.

As Kevin McKernan has pointed out, to retract articles accepted for publication, after putting them through the peer-review ringer, is a brilliant model for corrupt culprits. Here’s the assembly-line:

FIRST:

Don’t desk reject → Accept with reviews → Make authors go through peer-review → Take thousands of dollars for publication once it’s accepted → Take copyright

AND THEN:

Retract → Ruin authors’ credibility → Keep the publishing fees → Keep the copyright.

It’s a win-win for people hell-bent on clubbing good and honest researchers over the head til they drop.

Except that, winning isn’t everything, is it?

Oh, and watch this by clicking on the photo.

And this:

1. Kuperwasser C., El-Deiry W. S. COVID vaccination and post-infection cancer signals: Evaluating patterns and potential biological mechanisms. Oncotarget. 2026; 17: 1-29. Retrieved from https://www.oncotarget.com/article/28824/text/