At a public hearing in Washington D. C. today, Republicans in the U. S. House of Representatives claimed that government scientists have unduly influenced the editors of clinical journals, and in turn, those publications are stifling discourse about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. He responded, criticizing his Republican colleagues for making such accusations without good enough evidence and sowing distrust in science.
This consultation is the latest in a series of hearings organized through the Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to explore the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, despite a lack of new clinical evidence. Scientists have been wondering for some time whether the virus spread naturally, from animals to humans, or if it escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. Some have claimed that at the beginning of the pandemic, government scientists Anthony Fauci, former director of the U. S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that the U. S. government was not a member of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Francis Collins, former director of the U. S. National Institutes of Health, is also a professor at the U. S. National Institutes of Health. The U. S. Department of Agriculture (NIH) led the clinical work, adding journals, to push back against speculation of a lab leak.
During the pandemic, “instead of journals being a treasure trove of information,” they “acted as a deterrent to clinical studies related to the origins of COVID-19,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio who chairs the subcommittee. at the hearing. Raul Ruiz, a Democratic representative from California and the most sensible member of the subcommittee, responded, “Congress does not interfere in the peer review process and does not hold hearings to make baseless allegations. “
Holden Thorp, editor of the journals group Science in Washington, D. C. , appeared to deny the committee’s suggestion that he had been coerced or censored by government scientists.
The subcommittee also invited Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature, and Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the medical journal The Lancet, to appear, but neither was present. Skipper was absent due to scheduling conflicts, but a spokesperson for Springer Nature said the company “is committed to remaining engaged with the subcommittee and assisting them in their investigation. “(Nature’s press team is editorially independent of the journal’s team and publisher, Springer Nature. )The Lancet did not respond to requests for comment.
This isn’t the first time Republicans have accused members of the clinical network of colluding with Fauci and Collins. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen and virologist Robert Garry appeared before the same subcommittee on July 11 last year to deny allegations that officials induced them to publish an observation in Nature Medicine1 in March 2020, concluding that SARS-CoV-2 showed no symptoms of genetic disease. engineering. They wrote in the newspaper that they did not “believe any kind of laboratory situation is plausible” about the origins of the virus.
Some proponents of lab leaks have suggested, without evidence, that the pandemic was due to the NIH funding risky studies on the coronavirus at a Wuhan lab, motivating Collins and Fauci to promote a natural origin of COVID-19.
At the last hearing, Republicans went further by suggesting that Collins and Fauci not only influenced prominent biologists, but also encouraged journals to publish studies supporting the hypothesis of the origin of herbs. The accusation is in the emails Wenstrup obtained, according to Wenstrup, which show communication between the most sensible journal editors and government scientists. Thorp vehemently denied this set of questions. ” No government official instigated or participated in the review or writing” of two key papers2,3 on the origins of COVID-19 published in Science, he testified. “Any paper that supports origin theory in the lab would be subject to the same processes” of peer review as any other paper, he said.
Thorp also spent much of the 80-minute audience answering questions about how a clinical manuscript is ready for publication, what a preprint is, and how peer review works. In a tense moment, Wenstrup posted Thorp’s non-public X (formerly Twitter) on social media, in which he downplayed speculation of a lab leak. Thorp called the message “frivolous” and apologized.
Correspondence between journal editors and government scientists is to be expected, Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N. C. , said at the hearing: “Government actors who question academia on issues of an educational nature are either negligent or illegality — they are simply doing their job. “
Anita Desikan, a senior analyst at the Washington, D. C. -based Union of Concerned Scientists, which focuses on clinical integrity, told the Nature press team that it’s standard for government agencies to reach out to stakeholders to inform their policy decisions. One scientist suggests a concept for a journal article, “that doesn’t mean it will be published or get praise from the clinical community. “
Roger Pielke Jr. , a science policy researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was originally scheduled to testify before the subcommittee until his invitation was rescinded for logistical reasons, disagrees. He believes Fauci and Collins gave extra shape to the Nature Medicine article on the origins of COVID-19. 19 by recommending that Express scientists investigate and provide guidance along the way. Still, the hearing was a “failure,” Pielke Jr. says, because Thorp wasn’t the right witness. Instead, a more appropriate witness would have been a government official during clinical integrity, who is more adept at what constitutes a moral violation, he adds.
It’s me: https://doi. org/10. 1038/d41586-024-01129-x
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