Four Years Later, COVID Vaccine Study Pulled Over Fake Data

On Wednesday, October the 14th, a medical journal called Science Translational Medicine announced an official retraction. The study that was getting pulled was titled SARS-CoV-2 S2-Targeted Vaccination Elicits Broadly Neutralizing Antibodies, and it was published well over four years ago. Now, the reason for the retraction was that a third party looked into the specifics of that paper and they found that it contained fake data as well as fabricated graphs, which were presenting that data. Here was what the journal's editorial board said in the official retraction announcement, quote, after an investigation, the Francis Crick Institute has concluded that fabricated data are present in figure two, subsections B and C, And that falsified images are present in figure S6. The investigation concluded that the first author, Kevin W. Ng, was responsible for this and he has admitted responsibility. Further, the existence of data fabrication cast doubt on some other experiments presented in the paper for which primary data and samples are unavailable. In agreement with the findings of the investigation, we are retracting the article. Okay, so let's unpack that a little bit chronologically. The study was published again four years ago back in the year 2022 amidst the COVID pandemic and its primary claim was that they ran experiments and those experiments showed that vaccination against COVID-19 elicited strong antibodies. That was the broad claim. The experiments were done and they show that if you got the vaccine your body was eliciting strong antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 And among the experiments that were presented as evidence. For this claim, there were those presented in figure two of the paper. You can see it up on your screen right there. That graph shows an experiment that was allegedly done with mice. They were checking if mice that had already had a common cold coronavirus in the past reacted differently to a COVID vaccine afterward. Meaning in, I guess, simplified terms, if a mouse had previously caught the common cold, did the COVID vaccine work better for that mouse? Then in subsection B of the graph, it shows how many antibodies the mice's blood made against three different parts of the COVID virus's spike protein. RBD, S1, and S2, those are all different physical parts of the spike. And they claim to have been comparing three groups of mice. They took mice that had never been exposed to any coronavirus at all, mice that had been given the common cold virus beforehand, as well as mice that had been first given COVID. Then they took these three groups and they measured their COVID antibody levels before. Then they administered the COVID vaccine to all of them and measured their COVID antibody levels afterwards. And what the data supposedly claimed to show was that the mice, which had previously already been exposed to the common cold coronavirus, they made more antibodies that specifically stuck to the S2 part of the COVID spike after they got the COVID vaccine. And so. That finding is obviously a little bit nuanced and a little bit technical, but it actually doesn't even matter at all. You don't even have to spend a moment trying to understand what it all means because the whole thing was fake. All right, just to pause here for a super quick moment, it's Medicare annual enrollment once again. And I know the hundreds of mailers, phone calls, and texts that you're receiving are probably very annoying. However, this is the one Medicare message that you should consider not skipping. Most Medicare plans, they change every single year. Even if you like your current Medicare plan, it's critical to look at the 2027 plans or you might risk losing coverage that you actually need. 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Then there was also a figure two subsection C, which is a graph showing something else that was allegedly being measured. It's supposed to measure whether or not those antibodies that were developed could stop the virus from infecting cells. Meaning, do those developed antibodies have a neutralizing effect? And what they claim to have found was that a weak dose of the COVID vaccine by itself did not make strong antibodies in mice that had never seen any coronavirus before. But if the mice had already been exposed to a common cold coronavirus before getting the vaccine, that same weak vaccine dose did make antibodies. Basically, they were claiming that the common cold primed The mice's immune systems so that a weaker COVID shot could still do the trick, which is a really funny thing to make up. And the reason I say that it's funny is because as soon as I heard about the story, but before I looked into all the details, I just assumed that the researcher was maybe. a vaccine evangelist and he wanted to create a paper which could then be used to encourage more people to get the shot because four years ago was when the vaccine rollout was happening in real time because otherwise why would you put fake data in your paper like this but here in this case after looking into it he wasn't even really making the vaccine seem especially great great with his fake data. And so why fake it at all? But Fake it, he did. According to the Francis Crick Institute, who actually looked into the details, Mr. Kevin Ng, the researcher in question, he has, quote, admitted responsibility and takes sole responsibility for the data fabrication and falsification. Now, we here at the Epoch Times, we did reach out to that researcher who admitted to making up the numbers, but we could not reach him for comment. However, in terms of how this was actually... Uncovered four years afterwards, meaning why it was that four years later this paper was suddenly under the microscope, it had to do with the fact that other papers that Mr. Kevin Ng published were getting pulled in other journals. Quote, Nature magazine in January retracted another paper by some of the same authors, including Ng. That paper tested the responses of cells in the lungs of cancer patients to immunotherapy. An investigation by the Francis Crick Institute found manipulated data and data for which the source could not be identified. Eng was responsible, the institute said in a statement. Now that earlier paper that was pulled out of Nature magazine back in January, it was actually Mr. Ng's PhD thesis and it was titled, Antibodies Against Endogenous Retroviruses Promote Lung Cancer Immunotherapy. And within it, they found multiple places where Manipulated data was being presented as fact. Now, the Crick Institute did not release the name of the whistleblower or whistleblowers. They only said that they were made aware of some integrity concerns, and they decided to open up an investigation into that PhD thesis paper. But then, once that paper was pulled, the Crick Institute decided to initiate a second investigation, specifically to, quote, examine other papers on which Kevin Ng was a co-author whilst at the Crick Institute. And after they actually did this and looked into his other papers, they found the COVID vaccine fake data that we went through earlier. Also worth noting that while only two of Kevin Ung's papers have been pulled thus far, some of his other papers are getting notes attached to them, like this one here in the Nature magazine, where an editor's note was added to the top, which reads as follows, quote, readers are alerted that concerns have been raised regarding the reliability of data presented in this article. Further editorial action will be taken, if appropriate, once the investigation into the concerns is complete and all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full. And so there you have it. I mean, it's kind of wild if you think about how long it takes to get a PhD in a subject. I mean, it's like a 10-year journey at least, and then you're in the field I feel doing the research, so. I guess nuking your entire career in that way is one way to go. If you want to go through any of the details for some reason, like if you want to see the retracted papers, the papers with the notice, or the announcements from either the journal or the Crick Institute, I will throw all those links down into the description box below this video. And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epic Times. Stay informed, and most importantly, stay free.