01/11/2026
🚨 A serious and troubling development has unfolded in scientific publishing.
The peer-reviewed oncology journal Oncotarget has been hit by a sustained malicious cyberattack that began in December 2025 and intensified in early January 2026, making the website intermittently or completely inaccessible for days and blocking access to newly published research.
The timing is particularly concerning because the attack escalated shortly after the January 3, 2026, publication of an important hypothesis-generating review titled “COVID vaccination and post-infection cancer signals: Evaluating patterns and potential biological mechanisms.”
The paper, co-authored by Charlotte Kuperwasser of Tufts University School of Medicine and Wafik S. El-Deiry of Brown University (who is also Oncotarget's Co-Editor-in-Chief), systematically reviewed global literature from 2020 to 2025.
It identified temporal associations between COVID-19 vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infection and reported cancer events in 333 cases across 69 studies from 27 countries.
These included rapid disease progressions, recurrences, new diagnoses (some near injection sites), and signals from large population datasets in the United States, Italy, and South Korea.
Following publication, visitors to Oncotarget.com encountered persistent "bad gateway" errors that prevented access to the new article, proper indexing of recent papers, and normal journal functions.
The journal has publicly stated that it is experiencing an ongoing malicious cyberattack, which it has reported to the FBI.
As of today, January 10, 2026, the site shows partial recovery in some checks, but the journal continues to note the incident on its homepage.
It has expressed suspicions (without conclusive evidence) that individuals associated with the anonymous post-publication review platform PubPeer may be involved—PubPeer has denied any role.
The FBI has stated it neither confirms nor denies any specific investigation.
Dr. Wafik El-Deiry has spoken out strongly about the implications in social media posts, describing the timing and impact as a form of censorship that prevents important scientific information from reaching researchers, clinicians, and the public.
He wrote: "Censorship is alive and well in the US, and it has come into medicine in a big, awful way."
He added: "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."
This incident raises serious questions about the security and integrity of open-access scientific publishing, especially when it comes to peer-reviewed work on highly sensitive public health topics.
When legitimate research is disrupted by technical sabotage that limits its reach, it undermines transparency, academic freedom, and the ability to have evidence-based discussions.
🔗 See my previous post on this study: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1JweDqDBP4/?mibextid=wwXIfr
🔗 Read the study: https://www.oncotarget.com/article/28824/text/
🔗 Read more about the cyberattack: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15440249/amp/cancer-Covid-vaccination-journal-cyberattack.html
