A global review examining reported cases of cancer following Covid vaccination was published earlier this month, just as the medical journal hosting it was hit by a cyberattack that has since taken the site offline.
The study appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Oncotarget on January 3 and was authored by cancer researchers from Tufts University in Boston and Brown University in Rhode Island.
In the review, researchers analyzed 69 previously published studies and case reports from around the world, identifying 333 instances in which cancer was newly diagnosed or rapidly worsened within a few weeks following Covid vaccination.
The review covered studies from 2020 to 2025 and included reports from 27 countries, including the US, Japan, China, Italy, Spain, and South Korea. No single country dominated, suggesting the observed patterns were reported globally.
The authors emphasized that the review highlights patterns observed in existing reports, but does not establish a direct causal link between vaccination and cancer.
Days after publication, Oncotarget’s website became inaccessible, displaying a ‘bad gateway’ error that the journal attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
The journal reported the incident to the FBI, noting disruptions to its online operations.
In social media posts, one of the paper’s authors, Dr Wafik El-Deiry of Brown University, expressed concern that the attack disrupted access to newly published research.
‘Censorship is alive and well in the US, and it has come into medicine in a big, awful way,’ El-Deiry wrote in a post on X.
The FBI told Daily Mail that it ‘neither confirms nor denies the existence of any specific investigation’ into a cyberattack on Oncotarget.
The Daily Mail has reached out to Oncotarget for comment on the cyberattack investigation.
In a post that can no longer be accessed because of the website hacking, Oncotarget noted disruptions to the availability of new studies online. Although they did not accuse a specific group of wrongdoing, the journal alleged without evidence that the hackers may be connected to the anonymous research review group PubPeer.
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.
The message was shared on social media by El-Deiry before the website crashed, with the doctor adding, ‘Censorship of the scientific press is keeping important published information about Covid infection, Covid vaccines and cancer signals from reaching the scientific community and beyond.’
In a statement to the Daily Mail, PubPeer declared: ‘No officer, employee or volunteer at PubPeer has any involvement whatsoever with whatever is going on at that journal.’
PubPeer is an online platform where researchers can anonymously comment on peer-reviewed scientific papers after they’ve already appeared in journals.
Its stated goal has been post-publication peer review, meaning people discuss, critique, or point out potential issues in studies that have already passed the usual pre-publication checks.
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