Bad OA and Bleaching Cancer
Injecting bleach gets citable support from preprints and a bad journal article
The lede to the WIRED story grabs your attention:
Xuewu Liu, a Chinese inventor who has no medical training or credentials of any kind, is charging cancer patients $20,000 for access to an AI-driven but entirely unproven treatment that includes injecting a highly concentrated dose of chlorine dioxide, a toxic bleach solution, directly into cancerous tumors.
One patient tells WIRED her tumor has grown faster since the procedure and that she suspects it may have caused her cancer to spread—a claim Liu disputes—while experts allege his marketing of the treatment has likely put him on the wrong side of US regulations. Nonetheless, while Liu currently only offers the treatment informally in China and at a German clinic, he is now working with a Texas-based former pharmaceutical executive to bring his treatment to America. They believe that the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as US health secretary will help “open doors” to get the untested treatment—in which at least one clinic in California appears to have interest—approved in the US.
But for scientific publishers, this paragraph later in the piece is what really should resonate:
When asked for evidence to back up his claims of efficacy, Liu shared links to a number of preprints, which have not been peer-reviewed, with WIRED. He also shared a pitch deck for a $5 million seed round in a US-focused startup that would provide the chlorine dioxide injections.
These preprints include one on bioRxiv from 2024, another from Authorea Preprints (Wiley’s preprint platform) from 2023. A 2022 paper in Cureus — published OA and before the sketchy journal was acquired and somewhat straightened out by Springer Nature — is also mentioned. (Of course, it’s indexed in PMC.)
Scott Hagerman is a former pharma and mostly nutraceutical and wellness bro Liu is working with. In the WIRED story, Hagerman calls Liu’s bleaching approach “an unbelievable breakthrough.”
Unbelievable, indeed.
Our part in this is wrong. We shouldn’t have public preprints available for commercial exploitation years on. We shouldn’t have unreviewed manuscripts flung hither and yon for the mere sake of being “open” or whatever. Even years later, these preprints have not been published in journals, but have been “revised” in order to pump up interest in the “new version.”
We’re being played, and we’re a soft target.
It’s embarrassing, and people are being exploited and hurt.
Over to you, OA and preprint supporters . . .
