Taxacom: Science fraud - Nature

[John Grehan]

Yeah  - not wanting to go down the COVID hole, or any other subject. Just
happened to be example issues. Cheers, John

On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 3:04 PM Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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%7C2be1db543cb8411d40cc08dba4d825bf%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285020484613983%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=odNw0DmFPUfPxkCGZMTmPl7lt%2BqXX%2F%2FazTmFInJPasc%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%7C2be1db543cb8411d40cc08dba4d825bf%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285020484613983%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=kCYqTl8mkom5Ao%2FWDT3Lu0QGevNo6xlMJ8W%2B9vmFRM4%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%7C2be1db543cb8411d40cc08dba4d825bf%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285020484613983%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=kCYqTl8mkom5Ao%2FWDT3Lu0QGevNo6xlMJ8W%2B9vmFRM4%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%7C2be1db543cb8411d40cc08dba4d825bf%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285020484613983%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=VH0FFYDXRawawHygiNHLEK7DScj3dINPKSWU%2B17bxpk%3D&reserved=0 (use the 'visit archived web site'
>>>>> link, then the 'Ghost Moth Research page' link.
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Taxacom Mailing List
>>>>>
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>>>>>
>>>>> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration
>>>>> for about 36 years, 1987-2023.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhepialidsoftheworld.com.au%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C2be1db543cb8411d40cc08dba4d825bf%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285020484613983%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=VH0FFYDXRawawHygiNHLEK7DScj3dINPKSWU%2B17bxpk%3D&reserved=0 (use the 'visit archived web site'
>>> link, then the 'Ghost Moth Research page' link.
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhepialidsoftheworld.com.au%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C2be1db543cb8411d40cc08dba4d825bf%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638285020484613983%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=VH0FFYDXRawawHygiNHLEK7DScj3dINPKSWU%2B17bxpk%3D&reserved=0 (use the 'visit archived web site'
>> link, then the 'Ghost Moth Research page' link.
>>
>

-- 
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link, then the 'Ghost Moth Research page' link.