Thread by @Ayjchan

Tough questions about the #pangolinpapers and the peer review process in this investigative article by the @USRightToKnow

At least half a dozen people on twitter bombarded me with this article today for good reason...

https://twitter.com/garyruskin/status/1325972484768763904

It relates to the curiosity of all of these #pangolinpapers being released on Feb 18-20, driving a mania that SARS2 came from pangolins; all 4 papers used the same 2019 dataset; there is a web of co-authorship (scroll to end of the thread cited here):

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1320349645885886464

I'm saving a 🔥🐉 thread on the issues in these papers for when their corrections are issued. But key questions raised by @USRightToKnow (I'm paraphrasing):

1. Did these authors know about each other preprinting in the same 3 days (3 groups on Feb 20, 1 group on Feb 18)?

2. Why is it so damn difficult to get their data (and their story) straight?

Is it permissible to be deliberating withholding published data, publishing renamed samples from other works sans attribution, not issuing corrections months after realizing these errors?

3. At this point, can anyone verify that these data actually came from pangolins? Are there samples/viruses that can be shared?

Can a truly independent investigation look into where these samples came from, the smugglers, co-smuggled animals to corroborate the story?

@WHO or any independent investigation team, I would start here. This has an email trail (from January if you count the RaTG13 @Nature paper) that exists outside of China. Spread across at least 3 reputable scientific journals and numerous peer reviewers from US/UK.

"The silence of the journals regarding their ongoing investigations means that wider communities of scientists, policymakers and the public impacted by COVID-19 are unaware of the problems associated with the research papers, said Dr. Suryanarayanan."

usrtk.org/biohazards/cor…

To journal editors & peer reviewers: it's not your fault that you didn't spot these problems. You were probably not reading all 4 pangolin papers at once and comparing their raw data (peer reviewers are not paid!).

What you will be judged on is your response to these findings.

Both of the journals in question @Nature @PLOSPathogens were notified in May of these issues. We're in November now. Notices of concern have not been placed on these articles that are clearly missing raw data or have a jumbled story of their research.

Since their publication in May, Xiao et al. @Nature has been accessed 92K times, cited 58 times on CrossRef; 17 news outlets, ranked 755th of the 278,882 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Since their publication in May, Liu et al @PLoSPathogens has been viewed 28K+ times, cited 43 times on CrossRef. journals.plos.org/plospathogens/…

So many of the top publications discussing SARS2 origins, natural spillover, intermediate hosts, evolution, even costly wet lab experiments! use these pangolin CoV papers and their sequences.

Can we stop and check these can even be verified (data and story)?