[D66] [JD: 108] Beijing's useful idiots - UnHerd

[R.O.]

unherd.com <https://unherd.com/2021/06/beijings-useful-idiots/>


  Beijing's useful idiots - UnHerd

ianbirrell
13-17 minutes
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Just over a year ago, I stumbled across an intriguing scientific paper.
It suggested the pandemic that was ripping around the world was
“uniquely adapted to infect humans”; it was “not typical of a normal
zoonotic infection” since it first appeared with “exceptional” ability
to enter human cells. The author of the paper, Nikolai Petrovsky, was
frank about the disease when we spoke back then, saying its adaptability
was either “a remarkable coincidence or a sign of human intervention”.
He even broke the scientific omertà by daring to admit that “no one can
say a laboratory leak is not a possibility”.

But even though Petrovsky has excellent credentials — professor of
medicine at a prominent Australian university, author of more than 200
papers in scientific journals and founder of a company funded by the US
government to develop new vaccine technologies — I was still anxious
when my story went global
<https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8351091/Top-vaccine-scientist-says-coronavirus-come-animal-freak-nature.html>.
His original document had been posted on a pre-print site, so had not
been peer reviewed, unlike if it had been published in a medical or
scientific journal. These sorts of sites allow researchers to get
findings out quickly. Petrovsky told me his first attempt to place these
seismic findings was on BioRxiv, run by prominent New York laboratory.
But it was rejected; eventually he succeeded on ArXiv, a rival server
run by Cornell University. Last week, however, he told me this important
origins modelling paper had finally been accepted by Nature Scientific
Reports after “a harrowing 12 months of repeated reviews, rejections,
appeals, re-reviews and finally now acceptance”.

This acceptance is one more sign of the changing political climate as
suddenly it is deemed permissible to discuss the possibility that the
virus causing havoc around the world might have emerged from a
laboratory.* *Petrovsky has had to endure what he calls “the legitimacy”
of his paper as a peer-reviewed publication being denied for a critical
12 months — and he is far from alone. “I have heard all too many tales
from other academics who have been equally frustrated in getting their
manuscripts dealing with research into the origins of the virus
published,” he said.

Bear in mind that in the heat of this pandemic, papers printed in
important journals were peer-reviewed within 10 weeks; one rattled
through the process in just nine days for /Nature/. But, like Petrovsky,
I have heard similar stories from many other frustrated experts who
confronted the conventional wisdom that this lethal virus was a natural
spillover event. Some could not even get letters published, let alone
challenge those key papers promoting the Chinese perspective which have
since turned out to be flawed or wrong.

Only now is acceptance emerging that the science establishment colluded
to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory, assisted by
prominent experts with clear conflicts of interest, patsy politicians
and a pathetic media that mostly failed to do its job. And yet, at the
heart of this scandal lie some of the world’s most influential science
journals. These should provide a forum for pulsating debate as experts
explore and test theories, especially on something as contentious and
fascinating as the possible origins of a global pandemic. Instead, some
have played a central role in shutting down discussion and discrediting
alternative views on the origins, with disastrous consequences for our
understanding of events.

Many scientists have been dismayed by their actions. “It is very
important to talk about the scientific journals — I think they are
partially responsible for the cover-up,” said Virginie
Courtier-Orgogozo, a leading French evolutionary biologist and key
member of the Paris Group of scientists challenging the established view
on these issues. The rejection of the lab leak hypothesis, she argues,
in many places was not due to Trump’s intervention but the result of
“respectable scientific journals not accepting to discuss the matter”.

The Paris Group, for instance, submitted a letter to /The Lancet/ in
early January signed by 14 experts from around the world calling for an
open debate, arguing that “the natural origin is not supported by
conclusive arguments and that a lab origin cannot be formally
discarded”. This does not seem contentious. But it was rejected on the
basis it was “not a priority for us”. When the authors queried this
decision, it was reassessed and returned without peer review by
editor-in-chief Richard Horton with a terse dismissal saying “we have
agreed to uphold our original decision to let this go”. The authors
ended up publishing their statement on a pre-print site.

Yet this is the same prestigious journal that published a now infamous
statement early last year attacking “conspiracy theories suggesting that
Covid-19 does not have a natural origin
<https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext>“.
Clearly, this was designed to stifle debate. It was signed by 27 experts
but later turned out to have been covertly drafted by Peter Daszak
<https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/ecohealth-alliance-orchestrated-key-scientists-statement-on-natural-origin-of-sars-cov-2/>,
the British scientist with extensive ties to Wuhan Institute of
Virology. To make matters worse, /The Lancet /then set up a commission
on the origins — and incredibly, picked Daszak to chair its 12-person
task force, joined by five others who signed that statement dismissing
ideas the virus was not a natural occurrence.

Horton has been scathing about British government failures on the
pandemic, even publishing a book lambasting them. Perhaps he would do
well to turn his critical fire on his own journal’s failings as its
200th anniversary approaches. This is, remember, the same organ that
inflamed the anti-vaccine movement by promoting Andrew Wakefield’s
nonsense on MMR jabs — and then took 12 years to retract the damaging
paper. But it is far from alone. The Paris Group has been collecting
details of dissenting scientists, whose letters or critical articles
were rebuffed by key journals which include /Nature/ and /Science/,
another two of the world’s most influential vehicles for scientific debate.

/Nature/’s stance has been especially questionable. Around the same time
as Daszak’s letter was printed, a statement started appearing at the top
of some previously-published papers such as one on “gain of function
research” by US virologist Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli, the “batwoman”
expert from Wuhan, entitled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat
coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence”. This
carefully-crafted note said such papers were being used as “basis for
unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing Covid-19 was
engineered”, adding “there is no evidence that this is true; scientists
believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus”.

/Nature/ also published a landmark paper from Prof Shi and two
colleagues, sent to them on the same day last January that China
belatedly admitted to human transmission. This detailed the existence of
a virus called RaTG13 that was taken from a horseshoe bat and stored at
Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was said to be the closest known
relative to Sars-Cov-2 with more than 96% genetic similarity. This was
highly significant since it underlined that such diseases occur in
nature, yet although closely related, would have taken decades to evolve
in the wild and seemed too distant to be manipulated in a laboratory.

Some experts were immediately suspicious over the lack of information on
this new strain. The reason soon became clear: its name had been changed
from another virus identified in a previous paper but — unusually for
such a publication — this was not cited in /Nature/. This masked a link
to three miners who had died from a strange respiratory disease while
clearing out bat droppings in a cave in south China, which was hundreds
of miles from Wuhan but used by Shi and her colleagues to collect
samples from bats. The Wuhan researchers even admitted they had eight
more undisclosed Sars-like viruses from the mine. But despite a barrage
of complaints that began within weeks of publication, it took
/Nature/ 10 months to publish her addendum, which only raised more
questions that remain unanswered to this day.

/Nature/ /Medicine/, its sister publication, was also home for the
second key commentary that set the tone in the scientific community
after Daszak’s outing in /The Lancet. /“The proximal origin of
Sars-CoV-2″ bluntly concluded that “we do not believe that any type of
laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Critics pointed out it was
questionable to claim there was any “evidence” proving that Sars-CoV-2
is not a purposefully manipulated virus. Others noted that the statement
mentions the mysterious furin cleavage site — which Nikolai Petrovksy
drew attention to as allowing the spike protein to bind effectively to
cells in human tissues yet which is not found in the most
closely-related coronaviruses — but downplays its potential
significance. The statement suggests “it is likely that Sars-CoV-2-like
viruses with partial or full polybasic cleavage sites will be discovered
in other species”. This has not happened so far.

This document — whose five signatories include one expert who was handed
China’s top award for foreign scientists after nearly 20 years work
there, and another who is a “guest professor” for the Chinese Centre for
Disease Control and Prevention — has been accessed 5.4 million times and
cited almost 1,500 times in other papers. It is so influential that when
I emailed Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and one of /The
Lancet/ signatories, to see if his stance remained the same, he pointed
me to this paper that he called “the most important research on the
genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus”.

The lead author was Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps
Research Institute in California who has been a very active voice on
social media condemning the lab leak theory and confronting its
proponents. Yet the recent release of emails to Anthony Fauci exposed
that Andersen had previously admitted to the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases director that the virus had unusual
features that “(potentially) look engineered” and which are
“inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. He claimed
last week the discussion was “clear example of the scientific process”
but as another top scientist said to me: “What a smoking gun!”. Now
Anderson’s twitter account has suddenly disappeared.

There are many more examples. For instance, China pointed the finger at
animals sold at the Huanan Seafood Market two days after admitting there
was human transmission of the virus. Within weeks, four manuscripts
describing a pangolin virus with a similar spike receptor-binding domain
to Sars-Cov-2 were submitted to journals, all relying heavily on data
published by one group of Chinese scientists the previous year. Two of
these papers on pangolin coronaviruses were run by /Nature/. Inevitably,
the articles sparked intense global discussion over whether pangolins
sold at the market were the missing zoonotic link between bats and human
beings, similar to civet cats with the first Sars epidemic.

The pangolin link was a false trail laid from China. /Nature/, however,
rejected a submission from another key scientific dissident that showed
how all four papers primarily used samples from the same batch of
pangolins and that key data was inaccurately reported in two of these
papers. Richard Ebright, a bio-security expert and professor of chemical
biology at Rutgers University, argues that such tolerance of “material
omissions and material misstatements” expose a massive issue. “/Nature/
and /The Lancet/ played important roles in enabling, encouraging, and
enforcing the false narrative that science evidence indicates Sars-CoV-2
had a natural-spillover origin points and the false narrative that this
was the scientific consensus”.

Or as another well-placed observer put it: “The game seems to be for
/Nature/ and /The Lancet/ to rush non-peer revised correspondences to
set the tone and then delay critical papers and responses.”

But why would they do this? This is where things become even murkier.
Allegations swirl that it was not down to editorial misjudgement, but
something more sinister: a desire to appease China for commercial
reasons. The /Financial Times/ revealed four years ago
<https://www.ft.com/content/b68b2f86-c072-11e7-b8a3-38a6e068f464> that
debt-laden Springer Nature, the German group that
publishes /Nature, /was blocking access in China to hundreds of academic
articles mentioning subjects deemed sensitive by Beijing such as Hong
Kong, Taiwan or Tibet. China is also spending lavishly around the world
to win supremacy in science — which includes becoming the biggest
national sponsor of open access journals published by both Springer
Nature and Elsevier
<https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/corporate/elsevier-announces-the-opening-of-its-office-in-beijing-and-a-number-of-key-strategic-initiatives-in-china>,
owner of /The Lancet/.

One source estimated that 49 sponsorship agreements between Springer
Nature and Chinese institutions were worth at least $10m last year.
These deals cover the publishing fees authors would normally pay in such
journals, so they smooth the path for Chinese authors while creating a
dependency culture. They have worked well for both sides: they offer the
publishers access to the surging Chinese market and its well-resourced
universities, while offering international recognition and status in
return. But we know President Xi Jinping demands compliance with his
world view, even from foreign-owned companies — and especially on an
issue as sensitive as his nation’s possible role in unleashing a global
catastrophe.

Critics fear these corporate links to China compromise output and
distort agendas. “Scientific publishing has become a highly politicised
business,” argues Petrovksy. “Clearly there needs to be an international
investigation launched into the role of scientific publishers, their
increasingly powerful influence as the major publishing houses buy out
many of the smaller independent journals, together with their growing
politicisation and susceptibility to overt influence. We need to examine
what impact this may have had in the pandemic and what impact it could
have on science in the future.”

Certainly it is valid to ask where was the real conspiracy in this
tawdry saga that has stained so many reputations?

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