I don't think it works like that. We are under emergency authorization which means there are no rules. The government gets to do what they want. Then of course there is the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act that allows our government to lie to their own people.
I hear you, re: "the government gets to do what they want." Yes, that's true. Because it is a coercive monopoly (or, gang of thugs if you prefer.) BUT, the part of the "emergency" that grants the pharma companies protection from liability is the PREP Act. And the provisions of the PREP Act do NOT apply when fraud has been demonstrated. So it will be very interesting to see what happens if this makes its way to court. Which of course it should.
I can't say this will or won't happen again, but in the recent past the corrupt judges won't allow testimony of expert witnesses, or they mysteriously die right before they go to trial like bio-weapon expert Francis Boyle
The methods section of the paper by Speicher, Rose, and McKernan says: "Correlations between VAERS data and DNA levels for spike, ori and SV40 were plotted and calculated using the Pearson correlation coefficient." (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08916934.2025.2551517)
But I didn't see the correlation plots anywhere. The correlation plots were included in the preprint version of the paper from 2023: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/mjc97_v1. But the authors appear to have forgotten to edit the methods section after they removed the plots from the published version of the paper.
When I recreated the correlation plots, the level of DNA measured with Qubit fluorometry got a negative correlation with the ratio of serious adverse events out of total adverse events: https://x.com/henjin256/status/1964351515272880524.
I have asked the authors many times why they removed the correlation plots from the paper, but they have never answered me. Perhaps the authors did not want to report results which did not conform to their agenda. Or there might also be some less nefarious reason, like how the SAE/AE ratio was distorted by batches with a small sample size of adverse events.
At time 26:12 McKernan said that people at PubPeer went after Wafik El-Deiry after he published a paper that showed the spike protein downregulates P53.
In 2020 Cheshire already wrote that the editorial board of the journal Oncotarget was "a rogues gallery of @PubPeer favorites: Pandolfi, Croce, El-Deiry": https://x.com/Thatsregrettab1/status/1287830346138914816. Oncotarget is infamous at PubPeer for publishing a large amount of fraudulent cancer papers. El-Deiry became subjected to renewed scrutiny by people at PubPeer after June 2024, when he was appointed as the editor-in-chief of Oncotarget: https://x.com/Thatsregrettab1/status/1808100558156284171. It was only months later in December 2024 that El-Deiry was nominated as a candidate for the director of the National Cancer Institute: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20250521-wafik-el-deiry/.
When El-Deiry was appointed as the editor-in-chief of Oncotarget, the PubPeer contributor David Sanders wrote: "Journal @OncotargetJrnl has fake peer review as demonstrated by this article that included male patients with #ovariancancer. It took more than two years to retract this article. Perfect EIC-@Oncotarget fit." (https://x.com/DavidSandersRep/status/1808105698460361197) He referred to this paper, where in Table 1 they had 19 male and 29 female patients with ovarian cancer: https://www.oncotarget.com/article/21069/text/.
At time 31:33 you referred to an email where supposedly a PubPeer contributor was asking for a 5,000 USD fee to get a paper retracted. I posted the following comment about the email to McKernan's blog, but he deleted my comment, so I'll repost my comment here. (But at least he's now saying that the screenshot might be fake, which I guess is some form of progress.)
---
You posted a screenshot of an email where the PubPeer contributor Alexander Magazinov supposedly wrote: "My team manages several Pubpeer blue accounts, we generally charge 500$. We charge 5000$ for retracting an article. Please send me the DOI of the papers and Paypal me".
The screenshot appears to originate from a Twitter user called EdwardResearch (Edward M. Kevin), who has only 37 tweets, but most of them attack Alexander Magazinov. He has also posted two other similarly formatted screenshots, one of which he supposedly received from a sales representative of a Russian paper mill website.
PubPeer is written in camel case, but in the supposed email by Magazinov it was incorrectly written as "Pubpeer".
The real Alexander Magazinov seems to correctly write PubPeer in camel case. See for example this article he wrote for Leonid Schneider's blog: https://forbetterscience.com/2022/10/19/the-incredible-collaborations-of-renaissance-men-and-women/. But Edward M. Kevin posted this comment to the article with the name "Alex Jons", where he didn't write PubPeer in camel case: "Alexander Magazinov made a great contribution. He will have a great future of ethics if he follows what Nick doing. No need to lie or fabrication. To make a point he wont need to fake Pubpeer accounts. This will damage his reputation and loos our trust. I estimated that Alexander Magazinov owns at least 43 Pubpeer accounts. I identified this by following the patterns that he follows up comments on Pubpeer. Every time he want to frame someone, he uses one of his 43 Pubpeer accounts to seemingly make a independent comment, and later he thanks that account for pointing that to him. Alexander Magazinov says he lives in Kazakhstan and he is a software engineer. But government of Kazakhstan confirmed he has never ever entered the country. A third party made a court order in Kazakhstan for arresting Alexander Magazinov. But turned out he had never been in Kazakhstan. He is also not a software engineer. What is wrong with being an ethics expert. Why do you want to be an engineer? if you keep receive money for profiling and retraction we will loos hope. Please drop the cash for retraction business model. Thank you."
Edward M. Kevin also posted this tweet where he didn't write PubPeer in camel case: "Alexander Magazinov virus plant the citation in your article without you knowing it. Then he reports your on Pubpeer to suppress your future citations. @ellie_kincaid @ElsevierConnect @springer @Nature @AbalkinaAnna @SciReports @MDPIOpenAccess @FrontiersIn" (https://x.com/EdwardResearch/with_replies).
> As this article has no issues with figures, results, content or citations, sporting the retraction is not easy. What I can do is to Pubpeer him with the gangs several times, while he gets confused,
> in parallel we write to the editorial and put him under pressure for authorship manipulation shit.
> Eventually they give up and retract.
> PayPal me and we will get to work.
> Sincerely yours
> Alexander Magazinov
The email was written in broken English, but the real Alexander Magazinov writes in much better English. The choice of the verb "sporting" is unusual in the phrase "sporting the retraction", and I found zero hits on Google Search when I searched for the phrase "sporting the retraction" in double quotes. In the phrase "Pubpeer him with the gangs", the word "Pubpeer" was unusually used as a verb (and it was incorrectly not written in camel case).
EndwardResearch also claims that Alexander Magazinov was the secret cofounder of Russia's biggest paper mill. He posted a tweet that said: "Alexander Magazinov was the co-founder of the biggest Russian papermill http://123mi.ru the papermill sales representative insists he departed. @Yandex was the papermill production using paraphrasing tools. After 2021 the papermill exposed to @AbalkinaAnna & @gcabanac" (https://x.com/EdwardResearch/status/1683065159936245761). His tweet included a screensot of an email that he supposedly got from someone called Tatyana Aleksandrovna, who wrote:
> Ok Yes, Magazinov was the co-founder, but I ensure you he is not on board anymore. Company got rid of him in 2021.
> We stopped all cooperation with Yandex and not receiving technical support or articles from them.
> Go to court or whatever you want to do, he is not with us and even we are looking for him, not in Russia, I ensure you.
I tried searching Yandex for `"123mi.ru" "Александр" "Магазинов"` and Google for `"123mi.ru" "Alexander Magazinov"`, but I didn't find any information which corraborated the claim that Magazinov was a cofounder of the papermill website 123mi.ru.
The papermill website was launched in 2016, which was two years after Alexander Magazinov received a PhD degree from Russia's number one institute in pure mathematics: https://thebulletin.org/biography/alexander-magazinov/. The website looks extremely shady, and not something that a top math genius would be involved with: http://123mi.ru.
Alexander Magazinov also won two gold medals for Russia's team in the International Mathematical Olympiad: https://imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=8321. There are only 6 participants from each country in the IMO, and Russia is a large country with a lot of people talented in mathematics, so it's presumably very hard to get on Russia's team in the IMO.
I'll also repost this comment that McKernan deleted from his Substack:
---
ScienceGuardians is probably run by Matt Nachtrab. Elizabeth Bik wrote: "The style of SciGuardians' tweets reminds me of those by Matt Nachtrab, who relentlessly harassed me after I criticized papers related to his beloved $SAVA company - and who lost $50 million by ignoring our repeated warnings. You can find some examples of his tweets here, here, here, and here. In an interesting detail, Matt was so angry with our PubPeer comments that he started CureGuardian.org - a name uncannily similar to ScienceGuardians.com." [https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2025/04/18/scienceguardians-where-disgruntled-authors-complain-about-pubpeer/]
The website of Cure Guardian says: "Cure Guardian was founded by Matthew Nachtrab and the shareholders of Cassava Sciences who witnessed an unprecedented attack by short sellers to stop their FDA approved clinical trials for their drug Simufilam. The short sellers were successful in this campaign by leveraging an attorney (Jordan Thomas) to walk them into the SEC and DOJ and kickstart investigations. These outsiders should not be able to weaponize the government and institution investigative divisions against researchers and companies." [https://cureguardian.org/] ScienceGuardians also posted a long tweet about Cassava. [https://x.com/SciGuardians/status/1937339434447278260]
In October 2024 Nachtrab showed that he held about 2.7 million shares of Cassava Sciences. Their value was about 75 million USD, which made up about 36% of the total value of his portfolio. [https://x.com/MattNachtrab/status/1848772514610106719] Cassava Sciences had no products on the market, but they were developing an Alzheimer's drug called Simufilam. In November 2024 Cassava announced that they had stopped development of Simufilam because its phase 3 trial had failed, so as a result their stock price crashed from about 30 USD to 3 USD, and it has remained around the range of 2 to 3 USD since then. In April 2025 Matt Nachtrab tweeted: "I liquidated all of my $sava. I have lost all confidence in the team." [https://x.com/MattNachtrab/status/1910351007730618455] So he likely lost more than 50 million USD.
The value of Cassava's stock increased about 10-fold in early 2021 after they reported promising results in their Simufilam trials. Cassava had a market capitalization of about 2 billion USD, even though they had no product on the market, zero revenue, and only a few employees. Cassava was a high-volatility stock that was hyped up by meme stock traders on Reddit. [https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/cassava-sciences-can-recover-despite-harsh-allegations-2021-09-21]
In November 2021 a hedge fund called Quintessential Capital Management published a report about Cassava, where QCM wrote that their "main activity consists in identifying, investigating and exposing fraud and criminal conduct in public companies around the world", and they wrote that they had previously conducted campaigns which led to the collapse of several public companies. [https://assets.empirefinancialresearch.com/uploads/2021/11/Cassava-Report-FINAL-3-R-1.pdf] The report included a disclosure that "QCM is SHORT the stock of Cassava Sciences (SAVA)". QCM wrote: "We are a commercial enterprise, and we work for profit. However, we firmly believe in the moral character of our work, which has the effect of removing dishonest companies from the markets." I don't know if QCM was also behind the original citizen petition, or if they decided to target Cassava because of the information that was uncovered after the petition.
The report by QCM said: "A number of forensic experts including, Dr. Elizabeth Bik and consultants hired by QCM, have systematically reviewed the documents and confirmed the allegations, pointing out that Cassava and Dr. Wang could have easily disputed the claims simply releasing the originals of the images in question (for the record: they haven't)." But it's not clear if QCM compensated Bik for her research.
In December 2021 Leonid Schneider wrote: "This is probably the world premiere of data integrity sleuths seeking to earn money with manipulating the stock market by exposing research fraud. At least two sets of them are now short-trading Cassava stocks, betting on the stock value to drop as they reveal lies and fabrications this company submitted in scientific journals and FDA." [https://forbetterscience.com/2021/12/15/cassava-fraud-and-alzheimers-capitalism/]
So it explains why Matt Nachtrab would claim that the purpose of people at PubPeer is to game the stock market, even though it seems to rather reflect his personal experience with Cassava, and there are likely not too many other instances where the stock price of a company was considerably influenced by comments at PubPeer.
At time 15:50 McKernan said: "And SV40 was known to be a controversial piece of sequence that was in the polio vaccines that caused a cancer wave. Now, they try to debate that that cancer wave didn't happen."
He was referring to Ethical Skeptic's so-called "SV40 cancer wave" plot, where the age-standardized cancer mortality rate increased from 1960 to 1990, after which it started to fall down, until the mortality started to climb up again after 2021 (in an old version of the plot) or 2020 (in a newer version of the plot). ES blamed both the increase after 1960 and the increase since 2021 or 2020 on SV40.
Actually the increase between 1960 and 1990 was due to lung cancer, and the ASMR of other types of cancer combined went down over the same period of time: https://sars2.net/ethical.html#SV40_cancer_wave_plot_for_cancer_ASMR_since_1950s. The curve for mortality from lung cancer followed a curve for the prevalence of cigarette smoking with a lag of about 20-30 years. Also the SV40-contaminated vaccines were mainly given to children, but cancer ASMR went down between 1960 and 1990 among the generations of children that were exposed to the SV40-contaminated vaccines.
In May 2025 Ethical Skeptic published a new version of the plot, where now the curve for ASMR since 2018 looked completely different from the original version, and now the ASMR had a low point in 2020 an not 2021. He didn't describe how he changed his methodology between the two versions, and in fact I have seen no description of how he calculated the ASMR in either version of the plot. He took data for 1950-2017 from a dataset at Statista, but he appears to have inserted his own fake data into the plot from 2018 onwards. I was able to reproduce his plot up to 2017 but not from 2018 onwards.
In reality the cancer ASMR in the United States has gone down each year since 2010 if you use intercensal population estimates for 2010-2020. CDC WONDER doesn't use intercensal estimates, so there's slight jump up in ASMR between 2020 and 2021, because CDC WONDER uses population estimates based on the 2010 census for 2020 but population estimates based on the 2020 census for 2021. But regardless of what population estimates you use, the real cancer ASMR doesn't look anything like the line in Ethical Skeptic's plot.
I don't think it works like that. We are under emergency authorization which means there are no rules. The government gets to do what they want. Then of course there is the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act that allows our government to lie to their own people.
...and the govt. doesn't need permission to lie to the people. Again... gang of thugs, do what they want.
I hear you, re: "the government gets to do what they want." Yes, that's true. Because it is a coercive monopoly (or, gang of thugs if you prefer.) BUT, the part of the "emergency" that grants the pharma companies protection from liability is the PREP Act. And the provisions of the PREP Act do NOT apply when fraud has been demonstrated. So it will be very interesting to see what happens if this makes its way to court. Which of course it should.
I can't say this will or won't happen again, but in the recent past the corrupt judges won't allow testimony of expert witnesses, or they mysteriously die right before they go to trial like bio-weapon expert Francis Boyle
https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/dr-francis-boyle-died-jan-30th-2025/
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/discussing-the-legal-case-in-the?utm_source=podcast-email&publication_id=870364&post_id=172232604&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&utm_content=watch_now_gif&r=1qbg8v&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The methods section of the paper by Speicher, Rose, and McKernan says: "Correlations between VAERS data and DNA levels for spike, ori and SV40 were plotted and calculated using the Pearson correlation coefficient." (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08916934.2025.2551517)
But I didn't see the correlation plots anywhere. The correlation plots were included in the preprint version of the paper from 2023: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/mjc97_v1. But the authors appear to have forgotten to edit the methods section after they removed the plots from the published version of the paper.
When I recreated the correlation plots, the level of DNA measured with Qubit fluorometry got a negative correlation with the ratio of serious adverse events out of total adverse events: https://x.com/henjin256/status/1964351515272880524.
I have asked the authors many times why they removed the correlation plots from the paper, but they have never answered me. Perhaps the authors did not want to report results which did not conform to their agenda. Or there might also be some less nefarious reason, like how the SAE/AE ratio was distorted by batches with a small sample size of adverse events.
At time 26:12 McKernan said that people at PubPeer went after Wafik El-Deiry after he published a paper that showed the spike protein downregulates P53.
The paper was published in 2024, but people at PubPeer had already found many errors in El-Deiry's papers before 2024: https://pubpeer.com/publications/2D5EF86A346C5D37C24907CD48F209, https://pubpeer.com/publications/0215AD0A5D00E3CC7A2BA706D75CE2, https://pubpeer.com/publications/43CF876FF46E30F06D26DE1E646ACF, https://pubpeer.com/publications/0FE39240269D6605DF51431E47755D, https://pubpeer.com/publications/938F6A198CA05FC57993D3A459A228, https://pubpeer.com/publications/CA4BBB3CA7D7864F567377B55C6789.
In 2020 Cheshire already wrote that the editorial board of the journal Oncotarget was "a rogues gallery of @PubPeer favorites: Pandolfi, Croce, El-Deiry": https://x.com/Thatsregrettab1/status/1287830346138914816. Oncotarget is infamous at PubPeer for publishing a large amount of fraudulent cancer papers. El-Deiry became subjected to renewed scrutiny by people at PubPeer after June 2024, when he was appointed as the editor-in-chief of Oncotarget: https://x.com/Thatsregrettab1/status/1808100558156284171. It was only months later in December 2024 that El-Deiry was nominated as a candidate for the director of the National Cancer Institute: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20250521-wafik-el-deiry/.
When El-Deiry was appointed as the editor-in-chief of Oncotarget, the PubPeer contributor David Sanders wrote: "Journal @OncotargetJrnl has fake peer review as demonstrated by this article that included male patients with #ovariancancer. It took more than two years to retract this article. Perfect EIC-@Oncotarget fit." (https://x.com/DavidSandersRep/status/1808105698460361197) He referred to this paper, where in Table 1 they had 19 male and 29 female patients with ovarian cancer: https://www.oncotarget.com/article/21069/text/.
At time 31:33 you referred to an email where supposedly a PubPeer contributor was asking for a 5,000 USD fee to get a paper retracted. I posted the following comment about the email to McKernan's blog, but he deleted my comment, so I'll repost my comment here. (But at least he's now saying that the screenshot might be fake, which I guess is some form of progress.)
---
You posted a screenshot of an email where the PubPeer contributor Alexander Magazinov supposedly wrote: "My team manages several Pubpeer blue accounts, we generally charge 500$. We charge 5000$ for retracting an article. Please send me the DOI of the papers and Paypal me".
That screenshot is probably fake. See this thread: https://x.com/henjin512/status/1968592789844754652.
The screenshot appears to originate from a Twitter user called EdwardResearch (Edward M. Kevin), who has only 37 tweets, but most of them attack Alexander Magazinov. He has also posted two other similarly formatted screenshots, one of which he supposedly received from a sales representative of a Russian paper mill website.
Jikkyleaks asked him twice what the source of the screenshot was, but he didn't answer either time: https://x.com/Jikkyleaks/status/1959072418489933931, https://x.com/Jikkyleaks/status/1917919077416460577.
PubPeer is written in camel case, but in the supposed email by Magazinov it was incorrectly written as "Pubpeer".
The real Alexander Magazinov seems to correctly write PubPeer in camel case. See for example this article he wrote for Leonid Schneider's blog: https://forbetterscience.com/2022/10/19/the-incredible-collaborations-of-renaissance-men-and-women/. But Edward M. Kevin posted this comment to the article with the name "Alex Jons", where he didn't write PubPeer in camel case: "Alexander Magazinov made a great contribution. He will have a great future of ethics if he follows what Nick doing. No need to lie or fabrication. To make a point he wont need to fake Pubpeer accounts. This will damage his reputation and loos our trust. I estimated that Alexander Magazinov owns at least 43 Pubpeer accounts. I identified this by following the patterns that he follows up comments on Pubpeer. Every time he want to frame someone, he uses one of his 43 Pubpeer accounts to seemingly make a independent comment, and later he thanks that account for pointing that to him. Alexander Magazinov says he lives in Kazakhstan and he is a software engineer. But government of Kazakhstan confirmed he has never ever entered the country. A third party made a court order in Kazakhstan for arresting Alexander Magazinov. But turned out he had never been in Kazakhstan. He is also not a software engineer. What is wrong with being an ethics expert. Why do you want to be an engineer? if you keep receive money for profiling and retraction we will loos hope. Please drop the cash for retraction business model. Thank you."
Edward M. Kevin also posted this tweet where he didn't write PubPeer in camel case: "Alexander Magazinov virus plant the citation in your article without you knowing it. Then he reports your on Pubpeer to suppress your future citations. @ellie_kincaid @ElsevierConnect @springer @Nature @AbalkinaAnna @SciReports @MDPIOpenAccess @FrontiersIn" (https://x.com/EdwardResearch/with_replies).
There's also another supposed screenshot of an email from Alexander Magazinov that was posted by Edward M. Kevin, which said (https://x.com/EdwardResearch/status/1741044890275115074):
> Hi [retracted]
> As this article has no issues with figures, results, content or citations, sporting the retraction is not easy. What I can do is to Pubpeer him with the gangs several times, while he gets confused,
> in parallel we write to the editorial and put him under pressure for authorship manipulation shit.
> Eventually they give up and retract.
> PayPal me and we will get to work.
> Sincerely yours
> Alexander Magazinov
The email was written in broken English, but the real Alexander Magazinov writes in much better English. The choice of the verb "sporting" is unusual in the phrase "sporting the retraction", and I found zero hits on Google Search when I searched for the phrase "sporting the retraction" in double quotes. In the phrase "Pubpeer him with the gangs", the word "Pubpeer" was unusually used as a verb (and it was incorrectly not written in camel case).
EndwardResearch also claims that Alexander Magazinov was the secret cofounder of Russia's biggest paper mill. He posted a tweet that said: "Alexander Magazinov was the co-founder of the biggest Russian papermill http://123mi.ru the papermill sales representative insists he departed. @Yandex was the papermill production using paraphrasing tools. After 2021 the papermill exposed to @AbalkinaAnna & @gcabanac" (https://x.com/EdwardResearch/status/1683065159936245761). His tweet included a screensot of an email that he supposedly got from someone called Tatyana Aleksandrovna, who wrote:
> Ok Yes, Magazinov was the co-founder, but I ensure you he is not on board anymore. Company got rid of him in 2021.
> We stopped all cooperation with Yandex and not receiving technical support or articles from them.
> Go to court or whatever you want to do, he is not with us and even we are looking for him, not in Russia, I ensure you.
I tried searching Yandex for `"123mi.ru" "Александр" "Магазинов"` and Google for `"123mi.ru" "Alexander Magazinov"`, but I didn't find any information which corraborated the claim that Magazinov was a cofounder of the papermill website 123mi.ru.
The papermill website was launched in 2016, which was two years after Alexander Magazinov received a PhD degree from Russia's number one institute in pure mathematics: https://thebulletin.org/biography/alexander-magazinov/. The website looks extremely shady, and not something that a top math genius would be involved with: http://123mi.ru.
Alexander Magazinov also won two gold medals for Russia's team in the International Mathematical Olympiad: https://imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=8321. There are only 6 participants from each country in the IMO, and Russia is a large country with a lot of people talented in mathematics, so it's presumably very hard to get on Russia's team in the IMO.
I'll also repost this comment that McKernan deleted from his Substack:
---
ScienceGuardians is probably run by Matt Nachtrab. Elizabeth Bik wrote: "The style of SciGuardians' tweets reminds me of those by Matt Nachtrab, who relentlessly harassed me after I criticized papers related to his beloved $SAVA company - and who lost $50 million by ignoring our repeated warnings. You can find some examples of his tweets here, here, here, and here. In an interesting detail, Matt was so angry with our PubPeer comments that he started CureGuardian.org - a name uncannily similar to ScienceGuardians.com." [https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2025/04/18/scienceguardians-where-disgruntled-authors-complain-about-pubpeer/]
The website of Cure Guardian says: "Cure Guardian was founded by Matthew Nachtrab and the shareholders of Cassava Sciences who witnessed an unprecedented attack by short sellers to stop their FDA approved clinical trials for their drug Simufilam. The short sellers were successful in this campaign by leveraging an attorney (Jordan Thomas) to walk them into the SEC and DOJ and kickstart investigations. These outsiders should not be able to weaponize the government and institution investigative divisions against researchers and companies." [https://cureguardian.org/] ScienceGuardians also posted a long tweet about Cassava. [https://x.com/SciGuardians/status/1937339434447278260]
In October 2024 Nachtrab showed that he held about 2.7 million shares of Cassava Sciences. Their value was about 75 million USD, which made up about 36% of the total value of his portfolio. [https://x.com/MattNachtrab/status/1848772514610106719] Cassava Sciences had no products on the market, but they were developing an Alzheimer's drug called Simufilam. In November 2024 Cassava announced that they had stopped development of Simufilam because its phase 3 trial had failed, so as a result their stock price crashed from about 30 USD to 3 USD, and it has remained around the range of 2 to 3 USD since then. In April 2025 Matt Nachtrab tweeted: "I liquidated all of my $sava. I have lost all confidence in the team." [https://x.com/MattNachtrab/status/1910351007730618455] So he likely lost more than 50 million USD.
The value of Cassava's stock increased about 10-fold in early 2021 after they reported promising results in their Simufilam trials. Cassava had a market capitalization of about 2 billion USD, even though they had no product on the market, zero revenue, and only a few employees. Cassava was a high-volatility stock that was hyped up by meme stock traders on Reddit. [https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/cassava-sciences-can-recover-despite-harsh-allegations-2021-09-21]
In August 2021 a law firm that represents SEC whistleblowers submitted a citizen petition to the FDA, where they requested the FDA to halt the Simufilam trials because of misconduct. [https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2021-P-0930-0001] Cassava's stock price dropped by about 50% after the petition, and two days after the petition was submitted, the law firm disclosed that their clients held a short position in Cassava's stock. [https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/cassava-sciences-can-recover-despite-harsh-allegations-2021-09-21] After the petition, Elizabeth Bik and other people at PubPeer began to look into Cassava, and the law firm later submitted a supplement to the petition which incorporated discoveries by Bik. [https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2021-P-0930-0023]
In November 2021 a group of four authors submitted another report about Cassava to the FDA. [https://www.cassavafraud.com] A Powerpoint presentation which accompanied the report said: "The authors of this presentation and the associated letter to FDA hold stock and options positions that may benefit from a decline in Cassava Sciences' stock price." [https://www.cassavafraud.com/docs/SAVAReport_Deck_2021_11_03.pdf] Cassava used the term "perpetrators" to refer to the authors of the report. [https://www.cassavasciences.com/news-releases/news-release-details/cassava-sciences-files-lawsuit-against-perpetrators-short-and]
In November 2021 a hedge fund called Quintessential Capital Management published a report about Cassava, where QCM wrote that their "main activity consists in identifying, investigating and exposing fraud and criminal conduct in public companies around the world", and they wrote that they had previously conducted campaigns which led to the collapse of several public companies. [https://assets.empirefinancialresearch.com/uploads/2021/11/Cassava-Report-FINAL-3-R-1.pdf] The report included a disclosure that "QCM is SHORT the stock of Cassava Sciences (SAVA)". QCM wrote: "We are a commercial enterprise, and we work for profit. However, we firmly believe in the moral character of our work, which has the effect of removing dishonest companies from the markets." I don't know if QCM was also behind the original citizen petition, or if they decided to target Cassava because of the information that was uncovered after the petition.
The report by QCM said: "A number of forensic experts including, Dr. Elizabeth Bik and consultants hired by QCM, have systematically reviewed the documents and confirmed the allegations, pointing out that Cassava and Dr. Wang could have easily disputed the claims simply releasing the originals of the images in question (for the record: they haven't)." But it's not clear if QCM compensated Bik for her research.
In December 2021 Leonid Schneider wrote: "This is probably the world premiere of data integrity sleuths seeking to earn money with manipulating the stock market by exposing research fraud. At least two sets of them are now short-trading Cassava stocks, betting on the stock value to drop as they reveal lies and fabrications this company submitted in scientific journals and FDA." [https://forbetterscience.com/2021/12/15/cassava-fraud-and-alzheimers-capitalism/]
So it explains why Matt Nachtrab would claim that the purpose of people at PubPeer is to game the stock market, even though it seems to rather reflect his personal experience with Cassava, and there are likely not too many other instances where the stock price of a company was considerably influenced by comments at PubPeer.
At time 15:50 McKernan said: "And SV40 was known to be a controversial piece of sequence that was in the polio vaccines that caused a cancer wave. Now, they try to debate that that cancer wave didn't happen."
He was referring to Ethical Skeptic's so-called "SV40 cancer wave" plot, where the age-standardized cancer mortality rate increased from 1960 to 1990, after which it started to fall down, until the mortality started to climb up again after 2021 (in an old version of the plot) or 2020 (in a newer version of the plot). ES blamed both the increase after 1960 and the increase since 2021 or 2020 on SV40.
Actually the increase between 1960 and 1990 was due to lung cancer, and the ASMR of other types of cancer combined went down over the same period of time: https://sars2.net/ethical.html#SV40_cancer_wave_plot_for_cancer_ASMR_since_1950s. The curve for mortality from lung cancer followed a curve for the prevalence of cigarette smoking with a lag of about 20-30 years. Also the SV40-contaminated vaccines were mainly given to children, but cancer ASMR went down between 1960 and 1990 among the generations of children that were exposed to the SV40-contaminated vaccines.
In May 2025 Ethical Skeptic published a new version of the plot, where now the curve for ASMR since 2018 looked completely different from the original version, and now the ASMR had a low point in 2020 an not 2021. He didn't describe how he changed his methodology between the two versions, and in fact I have seen no description of how he calculated the ASMR in either version of the plot. He took data for 1950-2017 from a dataset at Statista, but he appears to have inserted his own fake data into the plot from 2018 onwards. I was able to reproduce his plot up to 2017 but not from 2018 onwards.
In reality the cancer ASMR in the United States has gone down each year since 2010 if you use intercensal population estimates for 2010-2020. CDC WONDER doesn't use intercensal estimates, so there's slight jump up in ASMR between 2020 and 2021, because CDC WONDER uses population estimates based on the 2010 census for 2020 but population estimates based on the 2020 census for 2021. But regardless of what population estimates you use, the real cancer ASMR doesn't look anything like the line in Ethical Skeptic's plot.
I suspect he simply falsified his data, because I have busted him falsifying his data on many other occasions: https://sars2.net/ethical4.html#Cancer_diagnoses_in_England_per_population_aged_65_and_above, https://sars2.net/ethical4.html#Fake_linear_regression_of_cancer_mortality_since_2014, https://sars2.net/ethical3.html#Weekly_excess_deaths_from_natural_causes_in_ages_0_4, https://sars2.net/ethical.html#Deaths_from_malignant_neoplasms_with_excess_MCD_normalization. Canceledmouse also replicated my analysis showing that ES falsified the data in his plot for deaths in ages 0-4: https://openvaet.substack.com/p/us-data-census-flaws-alert-signals.