Springer-Nature, the Anglo-German publisher of the world’s leading scientific journal Nature, announced in 2017 that in some of its publications it was censoring articles that used words like “Taiwan”, “Tibet” and “cultural revolution”, when printing in China. In April 2020 Nature ran an editorial apologising for its “error” in “associating the virus with Wuhan” in its news coverage.
Around the same time Nature also attached an editorial note to a number of its old articles reading:
“We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”
The headline on one such article, from 2015, read: ‘Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research’, and it concerned an experiment done by a team partly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Sceptics have noticed that any paper arguing against a lab leak is rushed into print in days, while ones that argue for a lab leak are rejected or delayed for months. Elsewhere a paper about pangolins and the coronavirus has been exposed as rehashing data from an older paper, but has not been retracted.
Now, in an episode that would be farcical if it was not about such a serious topic, one of Nature’s journalists has got in a muddle contradicting herself in a bid to distance herself from one of the scientists most vocally defensive of China.
She denied having ever met him, then claimed that a picture of them together was “doctored” by rightwing meda, then deleted a bunch of her tweets confirming that she had indeed met him – but missed one – then retweeted a page from another organisation that appears to have been doctored to omit his name from a record of their meeting. Finally, confronted with the missed tweet, she admits she met him but claims she forgot.
The journalist in question, Amy Maxmen, has been covering the issue of the origin of the virus for Nature and on May 27 she published an article headlined: ‘Divisive COVID ‘lab leak’ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers’, in which she reported that scientists found the speculation about the possibility of a lab leak “unsettling” and that they were warning “that the growing demands are exacerbating tensions between the United States and China”, while the debate “has grown so toxic that it’s fuelling online bullying of scientists and anti-Asian harassment in the United States, as well as offending researchers and authorities in China whose cooperation is needed.” (When I was a journalist, offending authorities was a badge of honour.)