The Cureus Editors-in-Chief issued a retraction after this paper had completed the peer-review process and been published:
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign
https://www.cureus.com/articles/203052-covid-19-mrna-vaccines-lessons-learned-from-the-registrational-trials-and-global-vaccination-campaign#!/
Email from Springer Nature, by Tim Kersjes, notifying the authors of the retraction:
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/our-paper-critical-of-the-covid-vaccines
This Substack post by Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the paper's authors, presents their written response to each point raised by Kersjes.
From McCullough's introduction to the authors' written response:
"In a stunning act of scientific censorship, a little known publication integrity staffer Tim Kersjes has retracted a manuscript authored by epidemiologist M. Nathaniel Mead, MSc, after the paper drew global attention to the Springer Nature Cureus platform with record views/reads/downloads.
The paper called for a halt in COVID-19 mass vaccination based on a valid evaluation of the evidence. It topped >330,000 views/reads/downloads in a month as compared to an average Cureus-promoted paper which has only ~2700 in a year.
[The paper's] rating of >9.2 is considered 'excellent' and 'groundbreaking' appropriately characterizing this extensively cited paper with 293 references (average paper has 30).]
Kersjes raised eight points previously handled in an exhaustive peer-review process. The journal and its editors had the right to reject the paper any time during the review process. Once published, it is a violation of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Guidelines to retract paper without adequate justification."
From the authors' written response (by M. Nathaniel Mead):
"The statements made by Kersjes are false, misleading, and unsupported by evidence. Several claims were also arbitrary and capricious. Most of the statements appear to be adapted, either directly or indirectly, from the numerous comments made by the well-known vaccine industry social media trolls, Jonathan Laxton and Matthew Dopler, comments that were inserted almost daily in the Cureus portal following our paper’s publication...
In sum, the false claims made by Kersjes reflect a breathtaking dearth of scientific understanding. All of Kersjes’s comments were accounted for and subsumed by the review process; more sophisticated and meaningful variations of these comments were raised by the original reviewers of the manuscript and were handled with edits in the paper during the review process. The Cureus editors found the responses satisfactory and fully accepted the paper. The manuscript has been contracted and copyrighted, and has had a record number of views, reads, and downloads over a one month period for Cureus. Nevertheless, we will now respond to each of Kersjes’s statements in turn..."
Dr. McCullough (December 13, 2024) and Dr. Mead (June 18, 2024) have granted explicit permission for The Covid Index to publish Index Entries for their written publications.