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A shocking new meta-study linked Covid vaccination to cancer has gone offline after a targeted cyberattack against the medical journal hosting it.
The study, published in the journal Oncotarget on 3 January, was written by cancer researchers from Tufts and Brown Universities.
The researchers analyzed 69 previously published articles and case reports from around the world and managed to identify 333 instances in which cases of cancer developed or were made worse within weeks of Covid vaccination.
One of the studies that featured in the new meta-study featured a massive dataset of over 1.3 million US military service members. It showed a clear link between vaccination and a rise in some kinds of blood cancer.
“These findings underscore the need for rigorous epidemiologic, longitudinal, clinical, histopathological, forensic, and mechanistic studies to assess whether and under what conditions COVID-19 vaccination or infection may be linked with cancer,” the researchers wrote.
But within days of the article’s publication, the journal’s website was taken down by a cyberattack, displaying a “bad gateway” error.
The incident has been reported to the FBI.
One of the paper’s authors, Dr Wafik El-Deiry, said the attack is a deliberate attempt to restrict access to newly published research.
“Censorship is alive and well in the US, and it has come into medicine in a big, awful way,” he wrote in a post on X.
Individuals at Oncotarget have suggested the hackers may be “connected to the anonymous research review group PubPeer.”
The Daily Mail reports, “The researchers alleged that the cyberattack targeted Oncotarget’s servers to disrupt the journal’s operations and prevent new papers from being properly added to the site’s index.”
