It looks fake. Would a real medical researcher refer to SARS-CoV-2 as "coronavirus" in the title, as if they didn't know there were other common human coronaviruses? Why are they publishing on Google Drive instead of MedrXiv? Why is the last author a lawyer? Why does it say "Stanford PhD" in the byline? Dr. Broker (the first author) does seem to have been doing biomedical research at UAB last year (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336977942_Targeting... is a legitimate virology research paper he worked on, which doesn't make obvious errors like the above), but https://web.archive.org/web/20200403213718/https://www.uab.e... suggests he was gone by April 3. https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/chloroquine-hoax/ says he was born in 1944, so he'd be 76?

Hmm, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8143845/Malaria-cur... says, "Professor Thomas Broker, who was named in the 'white paper' before it was removed from Google, asked for his name to be disassociated with it, while the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he works, said a claim that Nobel Prize winner Dr. Louise Chow's laboratory was involved was also false."

"…the university's public relations manager Bob Shepard added that Dr. Chow, a Nobel-prize winner mentioned in the acknowledgments, was no part of the study.

"'No one at UAB has any connection to this paper,' Shepard said.

"Shepard said that Broker 'had previously done research into chloroquine as a possible therapy for human papillomavirus' which is more commonly known as HPV.

"Shepard said: 'He had some contact with one of the authors of that paper at that time. He had no involvement with the work on coronavirus and is not affiliated with that research in any way.'"

Now, I don't want to depend on the Daily Mail, but it seems like they may happen to have been correct in this case.

Likely because you posted a comment asking if a source is true on a completely unrelated post.

Is antispam censorship? You tell me.

Haha that’s a really great way of putting it.

All the worst censorship is framed as anti-spam/hate/misinformation, absolutely.

It's still possible to have personal judgement if a claim is true.

I assume many people would aggree that preventing bots from spamming a forum is not a form of censorship, even though it might be "technically true" in a sense that muddies the seriousnes of what we usually mean with censorship.

So having dissenting accounts deleted and the company claiming they are cleared as anti-spam does not mean anti-spam suddenly falls within the narrow definition of censorship some people use. It means the company is lying.

Yea in many cases anti spam isn’t censorship.

But in a few very nefarious cases, censorship is framed as anti-spam, or anti-hate, etc.

Google is on the frontlines of this. They banned InfoWars for example, any other “hateful” sites. They regularly change rankings for the sake of clearing spam, but almost always nerf a few legit sites that then are screwed under the weight of the machine.

Just because they do legit anti-spam doesn’t mean the also don’t do a variety of pretty evil things. Their search results are very liberal leaning, for example. Is that “censorship”? If you think the truth is liberal you may not agree, so it’s easy to see how people can justify almost any censorship as legit (oh it’s just spam/the truth/hate).

To me, Google is the most dangerous company in the world, with a proven track record of bias and a lack of taste.

Okay, but it's immediately clear that nobody who wrote this paper is knowledgeable about virology or the norms of academic publishing — but they were trying to fake it. Yet the first author is claimed to be a real person who is in fact a virologist with lots of academic publications.

How about Wired? https://www.wired.com/story/an-old-malaria-drug-may-fight-co...

> Except for that video, which hadn’t come out yet, Rigano put all that together and got in touch with Todaro. “I essentially wrote the publication based on my interface with various Stanford researchers and others, and we developed this body of evidence and hardcore science,” Rigano says. “James, Dr. Todaro, was doing the best job, I thought, of anyone in the media, any doctor, any news outlet, anyone on Twitter, of covering coronavirus. I’d been following his research on other items, like decentralized computing, for several years.”

> Todaro, who got an MD from Columbia and is now a bitcoin investor, was interested enough to collaborate on the document. “I added stuff that pertained more to the medical side of things, and gave a more, I guess, clinical feel to it,” Todaro says. “Something that Big Pharma is not going to like—it’s widely available, it’s pretty cheap, and it’s something that at least a million people are already on. It’s really got a lot of the aspects of something that can be rolled out quickly if the right clinical data is there.”

> Todaro and Rigano together started talking to Raoult about the small study he was then preparing, and they also called a retired biochemist named Tom Broker. He was originally listed as the first author of the Google doc, his name followed by “(Stanford).” That’s where Broker got his PhD, in 1972, but Broker has been, for years, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His area of research is adenovirus and human papillomavirus, which have DNA as their genetic material, as opposed to the RNA inside coronaviruses. They’re pretty different.

> Broker says he wasn’t involved in producing the Google doc and would never advocate the use of a drug without formal trials. Todaro and Rigano have since removed his name from it, at Broker’s request. “I neither contributed to, wrote any part of, nor had knowledge of this google.com document. I have never conducted research on RNA virus pathogens … I have no professional credentials or authority to suggest or recommend clinical trials or practices,” Broker wrote in an email. “Apparently I was inserted as a ‘gratuitous’ author, a practice that I have always avoided over my 53-year career. Moreover, I have never engaged any part of social media, privately or professionally. All of my scientific publications are processed through peer review. I suggest that you communicate with one of the actual authors.”

> Asked about Broker’s statement, Todaro says that Broker just didn’t want to engage with the attention the idea and document were getting “I don’t personally know Tom Broker. My correspondence has been with Mr. Rigano,” Todaro says. “When we started getting inquiries from the press, my impression was, Mr. Broker got very overwhelmed by that.”

So, according to Wired, the "paper"'s first author says that its real authors put his name on the paper without his knowledge or consent, which is dishonest (it goes far beyond the usual questionable practice of "gratuitous author" insertion, which places your sponsor as the last author), and that he disagrees with what it says. The "paper" is obviously not the kind of thing a real professor would produce. The real authors say he's lying.

It seems clear to me who's lying here. Wired caught them lying about a lot of other things, too.

In general, even having a sponsor as an author, the sponsor should still consent to being on there in some form.

Are you talking about morality or common practice? Morally you shouldn't claim someone is an author when they're just giving you money. Common practice in biomedical research is to do so without even telling them about the paper. But as last author, not first.

I was naively thinking they had that in their grant agreements. As a computer scientist I know that people end up on the paper that didn't write it. But I haven't had the case where people didn't know they were on it.

Thanks for the insight!

Thanks! That’s what I was looking for.