Taxacom: Science fraud - Nature

Thu Aug 24 13:42:58 CDT 2023

That's an interesting quote about not publishing in a climate journal for a
climate paper:  "This is a common avenue taken by 'climate skeptics' in
order to avoid peer review by real experts in the field." But just because
a climate paper is not published in a climate journal does not mean that it
can avoid 'peer' review. It depends on the journal and the intent of the
editor to ensure that proper peer review takes place. If a climate paper
was published in Nature or Science, which are not climate journals, is this
because the authors wished to avoid peer review?

On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 2:40 PM John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for that clarification Tony. As for Nature "might have a higher
> degree of scrutiny" - who knows. Saw this as yet unresolved issue below,
> this time involving Nature. I don't keep regular track of such questions,
> although perhaps I should, and write something on fraud in CODA
> biogeography - but then who would publish such?
>
> A growing number of people, including prominent scientists, are calling
> for a full retraction of a high-profile study published in the journal
> Nature in March 2020 that explored the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
> The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor
> Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2
> did not originate from a laboratory.
> “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct
> or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February.
> Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his
> co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible, but
> likely.
> “[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this
> is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this
> type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that
> scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from
> Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.
> Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that the
> virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from
> Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C.
> Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28,
> 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.
> ” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,” Garry
> said of the lab-leak hypothesis.
> “We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said on
> Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.
> To complicate matters further, new reporting from The Intercept reveals
> that Anderson had an $8.9 million grant with NIH pending final approval
> from Dr. Anthony Fauci when the Proximal Origin paper was submitted.
> ‘Fraud and Scientific Misconduct’?
> The findings have led several prominent figures to accuse the authors of
> outright deception.
> Richard H. Ebright, the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and
> Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, called the paper “scientific
> fraud.”
> “The 2020 ‘Proximal Origin’ paper falsely claimed science showed COVID-19
> did not have a lab origin,” tweeted Ebright. “Newly released messages from
> the authors show they did not believe the conclusions of the paper and show
> the paper is the product of scientific fraud and scientific misconduct.”
> Ebright and Silver are among those pushing a petition urging Nature to
> retract the article in light of these findings.
> Among those to sign the petition was Neil Harrison, a professor of
> anesthesiology and molecular pharmacology at Columbia University.
> “Virologists and their allies have produced a number of papers that
> purport to show that the virus was of natural origin and that the pandemic
> began at the Huanan seafood market,” Harrison told The Telegraph. “In fact
> there is no evidence for either of these conclusions, and the email and
> Slack messages among the authors show that they knew at the time that this
> was the case.”
> Only ‘Expressing Opinions’?
> Dr. Joao Monteiro, chief editor of Nature, has rebuffed calls for a
> retraction, The Telegraph notes, saying the authors were merely “expressing
> opinions.”
> This claim is dubious at best. From the beginning, the Proximal Origin
> study was presented as authoritative and scientific. Jeremy Farrar, a
> British medical researcher and now the chief scientist at the World Health
> Organization (WHO), told USA Today that Proximal Origin was the “most
> important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus
> to date.”
> Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking from the White House podium in April 2020,
> cited the study as evidence that the mutations of the virus were “totally
> consistent with a jump from a species of an animal to a human.” Fact-check
> organizations were soon citing the study as proof that COVID-19 “could not
> have been manipulated.”
> Far from being presented as a handful of scientists “expressing opinions,”
> the Proximal Origin study was treated as gospel, a dogma that could not
> even be questioned. This allowed social media companies (working
> hand-in-hand with government agencies) to censor people who publicly stated
> what Andersen and his colleagues were saying privately—that it seemed
> plausible that SARS-CoV-2 came from the laboratory in Wuhan that
> experimented on coronaviruses and had a checkered safety record.
> Indeed, even as media and government officials used the Proximal Origin
> study to smear people as conspiracy theorists for speculating that COVID-19
> might have emerged from the Wuhan lab, a Defense Intelligence Agency study
> commissioned by the government questioned the study’s scientific rigor.
> “The arguments that Andersen et al. use to support a natural-origin
> scenario for SARS CoV-2 are based not on scientific analysis, but on
> unwarranted assumptions,” the now-declassified paper concluded. “In fact,
> the features of SARS-CoV-2 noted by Andersen et al. are consistent with
> another scenario: that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a laboratory…”
>
> On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 2:22 PM Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi John,
>>
>> I took a look at the paper which is online and open access. I must say
>> when I saw it at the time of original publication I thought its main
>> conclusions very odd and at variance with almost all other research on the
>> topic.
>>
>> Just to be clear per your thread title - the paper does not appear in
>> "Nature" (which I imagine might have a higher degree of scrutiny), but in
>> "The European Physical Journal Plus" which is a different outlet, albeit
>> from the same publisher.
>>
>> Best - Tony
>> Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabout.me%2FTonyRees&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C148c78df29c943b7424d08dba4d2072a%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638284994204192189%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=xe76kCD%2FuhshDEhgXl6BV0wIPuGy9on5QBw5Vcv%2BfuM%3D&reserved=0
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 25 Aug 2023 at 03:59, John Grehan via Taxacom <
>> taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Recently when I noted about ZooNova as a publication option, a Taxacom
>>> colleague implied (oof list) that the journal was dubious because he
>>> considered one (or more) papers to be dubious (in that person's
>>> judgement).
>>> Here is a classic case of a 'Top' journal retracting a paper, showing
>>> that
>>> the supposed 'prestige' of a journal has nothing necessarily to do with
>>> its
>>> content. In this case it was picked up on because the paper in question
>>> appears to have run afoul of a sufficient number of prominent or
>>> influential researchers. In biogeography this does not happen, as the
>>> prominent (powerful and influential) players all play to the fraud (that
>>> being the misrepresentation of what CODA methods can or cannot do or
>>> support). Power is everything in science.
>>>
>>> Top science publisher Springer Nature said it has withdrawn a study that
>>> presented misleading conclusions on climate change impacts after an
>>> investigation prompted by an AFP inquiry.
>>> AFP reported in September 2022 on concerns over the peer-reviewed study
>>> by
>>> four Italian scientists that appeared earlier that year in the European
>>> Physical Journal Plus, published by Springer Nature.
>>> The study had drawn positive attention from climate-sceptic media.
>>> The paper, titled "A critical assessment of extreme events trends in
>>> times
>>> of global warming", purported to review data on possible changes in the
>>> frequency or intensity of rainfall, cyclones, tornadoes, droughts and
>>> other
>>> extreme weather events.
>>> Several climate scientists contacted by AFP said the study manipulated
>>> data, cherry picked facts and ignored others that would contradict their
>>> assertions, prompting the publisher to launch an internal review.
>>> "The Editors and publishers concluded that they no longer had confidence
>>> in
>>> the results and conclusions of the article," Springer Nature told AFP in
>>> an
>>> email late Wednesday.
>>> The journal's editors published an online note stating that the paper was
>>> retracted due to concerns over "the selection of the data, the analysis
>>> and
>>> the resulting conclusions".
>>> --
>>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhepialidsoftheworld.com.au%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C148c78df29c943b7424d08dba4d2072a%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638284994204192189%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=cNV8ntIoo76FckAzYuRu8g3Ecb%2BkW9GeimfZl8lcgEA%3D&reserved=0 (use the 'visit archived web site'
>>> link, then the 'Ghost Moth Research page' link.
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>>>
>>> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration for
>>> about 36 years, 1987-2023.
>>>
>>
>
> --
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> link, then the 'Ghost Moth Research page' link.
>

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