This paper is extraordinary, and not for its contribution to human knowledge. It epitomises many things that are deeply wrong with academia. It actually makes me feel a bit dirty just for being an member of the scientific establishment. (1/6) https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/07/2004999117

The 'Fosters' have a mate who's an Academician of the National Academy of Science (NAS), and they got this nonsense published, without any oversight. It's win-win, the Academician is a co-author. I can only hope he's senile enough not to realise the moral quandary (2/6)

I've witnessed this type of corrupt behaviour before. Many years ago, I co-authored a paper with Francesco Ayala (a serial offender in that register), that was published in PNAS without any actual oversight. I'm still a bit ashamed of that paper. (3/6)

Though, the level of corruption and tone deathness here remains pretty special. The #CoVID19 genomes were produced by a large number of scientists globally who shared their results for the 'greater good'. Others ran sophisticated analyses, which they made available. (4/6)

Then, a group of corrupt and incompetent scientists, who had contributed nothing to that global effort and have no relevant expertise, took advantage of this publicly available genomic data to publish a silly paper in a respected scientific journal. This is so wrong. (5/6)

The world is in flux, and the future that awaits us on the other end of the pandemic will be different. Though, one thing that feels fairly easy to achieve is for such corruption and abuse of power in academia to become an eccentric memory of the pre-pandemic era. (6/6)