Alzheimer’s play­er Cas­sa­va Sci­ences has been un­der fire in re­cent days af­ter a cit­i­zen pe­ti­tion with the FDA sug­gest­ed the com­pa­ny was play­ing fast and loose with its da­ta. Now, the com­pa­ny’s CEO is fight­ing back — but maybe not with the an­swers in­vestors are look­ing for.

In a lengthy pub­lic state­ment, Cas­sa­va CEO Re­mi Bar­bi­er blast­ed what he called a “short at­tack” on the com­pa­ny’s stock while do­ing lit­tle to di­rect­ly re­spond to a se­ries of al­le­ga­tions over da­ta ma­nip­u­la­tion out­lined in the cit­i­zen pe­ti­tion from last week.

“Let me be very clear: I think these al­le­ga­tions are false,” Bar­bi­er said — a quote un­like­ly to soothe in­vestors’ opin­ion of the com­pa­ny.

In Bar­bi­er’s telling, a shad­owy net­work of short sell­ers is be­hind the claims lev­eled by law firm La­ba­ton Sucharow, which he dis­missed as lit­tle more than “in­flam­ma­to­ry.” But Bar­bi­er did add more de­tail to counter the al­le­ga­tions about the West­ern blot analy­sis, a vi­su­al tech­nique used to de­ter­mine the pres­ence of a spe­cif­ic pro­tein, that was the cen­ter­piece of the law firm’s claims Cas­sa­va was ma­nip­u­lat­ing da­ta.

Bar­bi­er not­ed the com­pa­ny doesn’t have ac­cess to the orig­i­nal da­ta analy­sis, which was per­formed at the CUNY lab of Hoau-Yan Wang. With­out that da­ta in hand, Bar­bi­er said he has asked CUNY for an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to Wang’s lab and to make the find­ings pub­lic.

Even as he ad­mit­ted his team’s fault, Bar­bi­er al­so ap­peared to go out of his way to dis­cred­it im­ages from Cas­sa­va’s sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture cir­cu­lat­ed on­line, ar­gu­ing that “trolls” were ca­pa­ble of ma­nip­u­lat­ing those im­ages to im­ply they were fab­ri­cat­ed.

“We all know that once a pho­to­graph is on the in­ter­net, the pix­els that make up that pho­to­graph can eas­i­ly be Pho­to­shopped, cropped or oth­er­wise dis­tort­ed to mean any­thing you want it to mean,” he wrote. “Fur­ther­more, in­ter­net pho­tos are res­o­lu­tion de­pen­dent. This means an in­ter­net pho­to can quick­ly lose qual­i­ty and look blur­ry or pix­e­lat­ed, or what­ev­er.”

Mean­while, Bar­bi­er ad­mit­ted that there were two “vi­su­al er­rors” in the com­pa­ny’s re­cent da­ta pre­sen­ta­tions, but he didn’t spec­i­fy which im­ages were found to be in­cor­rect.

“In all cas­es, the da­ta analy­sis is cor­rect; the vi­su­al dis­play of the da­ta is not cor­rect,” he said.

What­ev­er the in­tent of his state­ment, it ap­peared to be work­ing in the short term. Shares in $SA­VA were trad­ing up around 11% be­fore the bell Fri­day.

It’s the lat­est in an in­creas­ing­ly bizarre saga for Cas­sa­va, which saw its stock plum­met af­ter the cit­i­zen’s pe­ti­tion and then drop once again af­ter test­ing part­ner Quan­ter­ix open­ly de­nied it had in­ter­pret­ed or pre­pared key da­ta used in the biotech’s re­cent pre­sen­ta­tions.

That re­sponse came af­ter an un­usu­al Q&A style state­ment from Cas­sa­va out­lin­ing its re­sponse to the La­ba­ton Sucharow pe­ti­tion in which the biotech ap­peared to claim Quan­ter­ix had a hand in prepar­ing the da­ta.

New data from HHS show that more than 162,000 courses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral Paxlovid were administered across the US over the past week, continuing a streak of increased usage of the pill, and signaling not only rising case numbers but more awareness of how to access it.

In comparison to this week, about 670,000 courses of the Pfizer pill have been administered across the first five months since Paxlovid has been on the US market, averaging about 33,000 courses administered per week in that time.

The FDA is offering more of an explanation of the guardrails around its program that may soon allow states to import prescription drugs in some select circumstances from Canada, but only if such imports will result in significant cost reductions for consumers.

While the agency has yet to sign off on any of the 5 state plans in the works so far, and PhRMA’s suit to block the Trump-era rule allowing such imports is stalled, the new Q&A guidance spells out the various restrictions that states will have to abide by, potentially signaling that a state approval is coming.

Leading the way to increase access to cheaper drugs worldwide, Pfizer said Wednesday it will provide all current and future patent-protected medicines and vaccines available in the US or EU on a not-for-profit basis to about 1.2 billion people in 45 lower-income countries.

Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal and Uganda are the first five countries to sign on to this accord, which will also seek to blaze new paths for quick and efficient regulatory and procurement processes to reduce the usual delays in making new medicines and vaccines available in these countries.