When a study attacking COVID vaccines — written by credibility-challenged anti-vaxxers like Peter McCullough and Steve Kirsch — somehow survived peer review and was published in an actual medical journal, WorldNetDaily was quite excited about the development, even as fact-checkers found issues in the paper’s research. A few weeks after publication, however, the journal retracted the study, noting that “concerns were raised regarding a number of claims made in this article” as well as “the validity of some of the cited references that support the conclusions and a misrepresentation of the cited references and available data.” WND unsurprisingly didn’t want to talk too much about this. Instead, it offloaded coverage of it to something called the Defender, in a partial article (which WND does when stealing the content of others) it republished on Feb. 29:
The journal Cureus on Monday retracted the first peer-reviewed paper to provide an extensive analysis of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine trial data and post-injection injuries. The authors of the paper also called for a global moratorium on the vaccines.
Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the paper’s authors, called the retraction “a stunning act of scientific censorship.” He told The Defender: “The journal and its editors had the right to reject the paper at any time during the review process. Once published, it is a violation of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Guidelines to retract a paper without adequate justification.”
The paper, published last month, detailed the vaccines’ potential serious harms to humans, vaccine control and processing issues, the mechanisms behind adverse events, the immunological reasons for vaccine inefficacy and the mortality data from the registrational trials.
The full Defender article features much more whining from McCullough and crew about how his shoddy research was exposed. WND didn’t disclose, however, that the Defender is a publication of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaxxer group founded by Robert Kennedy Jr., whose current presidential campaign WND loved as a Democratic spoiler until souring on him when he started running as an independent who might take votes form Donald Trump.
WND hasn’t published anything else on the retracted study since then, so maybe it’s not as interested as it used to be in sticking its neck out for discredited anti-vaxxers.