The article drew swift criticism when it was published in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics in August 2023. The retraction follows a December 11, 2025 decision by a federal court in Arizona rejecting a request for a temporary restraining order against the publisher by lead author Greg J. Marchand. The author pursued the order to prevent Taylor & Francis “from causing irreparable harm” to his “professional reputation by improperly retracting his published and peer-reviewed research article in breach of the parties’ contract and Taylor & Francis’s duties of care as a publisher,” according to his November 2025 complaint. 

The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona found Marchand was unlikely to succeed on the merits of his claim, and declined to “impose restraints on a publisher’s editorial discretion,” which the court said would violate the publisher’s First Amendment rights. The retraction notice, posted online January 16, 2025 states: "After publication, a major dataset that formed a central part of the evidence presented in the paper has been removed from public access by the issuing government authority; therefore, key portions of the published analysis are unverifiable using publicly available data."

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/01/21/lawsuit-fails-to-block-retraction-of-paper-claiming-to-link-heart-related-deaths-to-covid-19-vaccines/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPhx1BleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeNEaCeNjOne2C3qYyiIhgT0rYzsOhJIYt0Tp88kCK1fSYFvAVyJ043DHi6XU_aem_GX6EhNYdNUoWTiuhFR9QJQ

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