Taxacom: Science fraud - Nature

[Tony Rees]

Hi John, you wrote:
>  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?

No, I think it is fair to say that these are special cases, that sit
somewhere above more discipline-specific journals, for articles deemed to
have high importance; and accordingly, would seek out the best (?) experts
in relevant fields for review of any particular article. That would be the
hope, anyway :)

Not going to go down the rabbit hole of origins of Covid at this time,
however I note that the Rupert Murdoch-owned "Australian" was strongly
promoting views by a Sky News Journalist (who wrote a book on the same
subject last year) that everything is a cover-up and the virus escaped from
the Wuhan Lab. I fact checked her first 4 statements and they were all
incorrect, after which I lost faith in her analysis. For now I think the
best summary is probably at https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FOrigin_of_COVID-19&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C1c4d438931664206d2f408dba4d4f03d%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285007314109600%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=TbLlrkN40%2BF9LX4jcUXNjvTnUrImGOe75GkihK8bx2U%3D&reserved=0,
which Taxacom readers are welcome to consult for more detail, or even amend
if they disagree with it.

Regards - 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%7C1c4d438931664206d2f408dba4d4f03d%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285007314109600%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=heZkZKaTFpWNJiGAFV1VFGSOSd9Zhe9w0wcG%2B7fEfrY%3D&reserved=0


On Fri, 25 Aug 2023 at 04:43, John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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%7C1c4d438931664206d2f408dba4d4f03d%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285007314109600%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=heZkZKaTFpWNJiGAFV1VFGSOSd9Zhe9w0wcG%2B7fEfrY%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".
>>>> --
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>>>
>>
>> --
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>
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> --
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