Retraction Watch have responded by naming one of our reviewers and posting the review in their latest article

My opinion is that this comes ONLY as a result of OUR having discovered the name of the reviewer who authored an attached pdf.

This is all getting too weird for me. I am a biologist who has a knack for noticing things and pattern recognition. Makes me good at data stuff. I study immunological reactions to pathogens. I write. I surf. But this post-peer review whining and nonsense to support retraction efforts is getting a little … annoying.

Please refer to the article I wrote yesterday (Nov. 21, 2025) on the subject matter of an email from a journalist (Ellie Kincaid) at Retraction Watch to me, Kevin McKernan and David Speicher disclosing that one of our reviewers for our recently published paper passed their review to them.

Kevin also wrote up a thorough take-down of the “critiques” therein.

Retraction Watch Steps on Another Rake

Yesterday, November 21, 2025, Retraction Watch published an article which is also very telling.

The article is entitled: “Exclusive: Reviewer recommended against publishing paper on DNA in COVID vaccines”, and the very first line in the article written by Kincaid (the journalist at Retraction Watch who sent the above-mentioned email) reads as the following:

Rolf Marschalek was on vacation when he saw a new paper had been published in the journal Autoimmunity.

What a strange and defensive way to start an article. It is clear to Kevin and I (and others) why this was the first sentence written. It was in response to the disclosure of the fact that Rolf Marschalek’s name was not hidden in document property metadata in the pdf attached in the email sent to us by Retraction Watch. Again it is odd that this pdf was entitled Letter_to_the_Editor_VACCINE, and not Letter_to_the_Editor_AUTOIMMUNITY.

As I stated in my previous article, I believe that this is a letter to the editor penned as a rebuke of a study in the journal VACCINE, and not AUTOIMMUNITY, but this is speculation. It is date/timestamped 9/26/25, which was 20 days following initial online publication of our article in Autoimmunity. You can clearly see Rolf Marschalek’s name.

We discovered this yesterday, and it was published on X, and if this had not been discovered by keen eyes, my suspicion is that this article would have had a very different leading sentence. For example, I believe that Marschalek would not have been named.

The second sentence confirms that Marschalek was a reviewer on our paper. This, to me, is a no-no. I believe that reviewers and reviews are meant to remain confidential.

Marschalek, a biochemist at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, was “very upset,” he told Retraction Watch – because he’d peer-reviewed the manuscript and had recommended against publication.

Retraction Watch go on to actually provide a link to the review itself as a pdf! I am NOT going to post that pdf here since it would be a violation of COPE standards to do this, I do believe.

In Marschalek’s initial review, which he provided to us, he detailed how Qubit fluorometry, one of the methods the authors used to measure the amount of DNA in the vaccine vials, was “not suited” for use when samples contain much higher amounts of RNA than DNA, as is the case with mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.

According to Retraction Watch, Marschalek was pissed that our article went onto publication. Again, there is no need to go into “anti-vaxxer” world if there is merit in his critiques, is there?

“Thus, the revised version of the authors have strengthened my opinion that the whole paper is ‘a mission’ for the ‘anti-vaxx community’ and not a scientific paper,” he wrote in his review of the revision. He again recommended against publication.

The investigation of our paper began on September 17, 2025, which according to Retraction Watch, came shortly after Marschalek had complained to the editor of Autoimmunity. He was told by the editor to write a letter to the editor, which he did, but it was not published.

He complained to the editor of Autoimmunity, who told him he could submit a letter to the editor, he said. He did so, but it was not published, because the journal does not publish letters to the editor, a representative of Taylor & Francis, which publishes the journal, told him.

So this letter, is the same letter that was attached in the email we received from Retraction Watch journalist Ellie Kincaid on November 20, 2025.

However, there are some differences between the original one in our inboxes, and the one they posted.

First of all, the title has been changed. Instead of its name being Letter_to_the_Editor_VACCINE, it is Letter_to_the_Editor_AUTOIMMUNITY. Also, the metadata has been scrubbed. Strange that. Why would it be necessary to scrub the author name if Retraction Watch have already disclosed his name and his role?

This is strange, is it not?

Paolo Casali is the editor-in-chief of Autoimmunity, and also confirmed that Marschalek reviewed our paper but according to Retraction Watch, have no recollection of Marschalek ever recommending that our paper be rejected.

Paolo Casali, editor in chief of Autoimmunity, confirmed Marschalek did review the paper. But initially he said he was “confused” by our request for comment on the decision to publish the paper. Marschalek “did not recommend rejection of the paper,” Casali said.

Honestly. What is going on here?

In Marschalek’s own final words as per his review of our paper posted in the Retraction Watch article:

I also suggest to make the necessary and requested changes throughout the paper. I will be happy to review the revised manuscript again.

Happy, eh? Ok. That doesn’t sound like he was “very upset” to me? Maybe this was his first review? Who knows.

While I’m at it, I would like to make public how Marschalek began his review of our science study since it is in the public eye now: by defaming its authors. I was referred to as “the middle author” who “only published 2 published paper in her field of expertise” as per my ORCID account.

Rea-hee-hee-hheeeee-heeee-llllyy?

For the record, my ORCID is https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9091-4425 and according to ResearchGate, my Research interest score is 1,219, I have 659,755 reads, 531 citations and an H-index of 13.¹

He wrote:

…and the middle author who has listed many preprints on their orcid account but has only published 2 published paper on her field of expertise, namely data analysis.

That sentence above is pure horse-doody. I have 28 peer-reviewed published works and have attended (and obtained degrees from) 5 of the most prestigious learning institutions in the world. Data analytics is something a monkey can do: you don’t need a degree in it. It comes with the research and study.

Kincaid goes on in the Retraction Watch article to state the following:

Rose, one of the authors of the paper, declined to discuss with us the methodological critiques in Marschalek’s reviews or letter to the editor. But she did question how we obtained the peer reviews, which she called “confidential documents.”

Heyyyyy, whoa n-Ellie! I did not decline to discuss anything! In fact, as they state, I wrote an article about this. Kevin covered the “critiques”. I covered ethics. I did write back immediately requesting how they had a copy of one the reviews of our paper. Because, naturally, they shouldn’t have that unless one of the reviewers gave it to them … for some reason.

Thursday November 20, 2025 - Kincaid’s email:

Thursday November 20, 2025 - My immediate response:

I was polite, n’est ce pas?

The claim of Retraction Watch in their article is that everything is A-ok on the front of obtaining and publishing private reviews because “Many journals now publish peer reviews online with articles, a practice which falls under the umbrella of “open peer review.”” But reviews are not one of the things that fall under the “open” policy: the article is, but not reviewer metadata. When a journal says an article is published “open access” under a CC-BY license, the license explicitly applies to the article itself (the prose, figures, data presented in the paper, supplementary materials if they are part of the published version of record, etc.). Peer-review reports, reviewer names, editor decision letters, and timestamps are almost never included in the licensed article file or explicitly placed under the same Creative Commons license.

Each individual peer-review report is an original piece of writing and is therefore also protected by copyright, owned (in most jurisdictions and under most publisher policies) by the reviewer, or sometimes assigned to the journal. Publishing those reviews openly without an explicit license from the copyright holder (the reviewer) or without the journal having obtained the right to re-license them constitutes a copyright violation in virtually every jurisdiction.

Even if Retraction Watch were granted publishing rights via an explicit license to publish the review written by Marschalek for our peer review process, why is this done-and-gone review and/or a subsequent “Letter to the Editor” now being used in an attempt to retract our article?

Marschalek signed off on it. Vacation or not. Perhaps this a ‘you snooze, you lose’ moment? Je n’sais pas moi.

Apparently, as of today, a representative of the publishing group Taylor & Francis (they publish the journal Autoimmunity) will soon provide a statement about “the current situation.”

I can’t wait to hear what they say. I think the journal and the publishing group need to stick to their guns and to protect scientific integrity in this case, and us as authors. They appear to have an opportunity here to do exactly this. I have no qualms with the publishers or the journal at this point - at all - and I believe that they’re being put in an awkward position here as well.

From what I can ascertain for now - in this land-mine weird landscape created in spite of us - the Retraction Watch article was written to cover asses - I don’t know whose asses - but what’s most telling is what they don’t write in their article: as in, everything Kevin and I published yesterday to go on record prior to any pre-emptive attack → that included a thorough scientific debunk of Marschalek’s “critiques”. Kevin took a lot of time to do this. And for what? To defend an already defended critique point?

Why?

Summary

Unknown date - Retraction Watch were given Marschalek’s review by Marschalek unknown to us at the time until we looked at the attached pdf’s metadata (dated September 26, 2025).

November 20, 2025 - Retraction Watch apprised us of their having this review but did not answer me as to how they received it.

November 20, 2025 - a few, moments, laytarreee - We discovered it was Marschalek.

November 21, 2025 - Retraction Watch published their article, Marschalek’s review and named Marschalek. Marschalek’s review of our work was actually quite emotional and even defamatory. You should click on the link and read it since it has been publicized presumably with a license by Retraction Watch.

None of this seems right to me. Does it seem right to you? Oh, and, COIs much?

Let’s see how the ball bounces.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jessica-Rose-24