James Henderson Naismith
Emphasis in the original:
On Tue, 6 Oct 2020 at 13:04, Medcomm editorial office <editorial@med-comm.org> wrote:
Good day to you.
We are writing to you in the hope of a retraction for your article published in MedComm
Article ID: MCO220
Title:The world should establish an early warning system for new viral infectious diseases by space‐weather monitoring
Publish Date: 23 July 2020
The reasons are as follows:
1) MedComm emphasizes original findings that advance the understanding of pathogenesis or improve the diagnosis and treatment of human disease, interdisciplinary studies utilizing approaches of molecular biology, cell biology, chemistry, pharmacology or material science to address the issues of clinical, basic and translational medicines are particularly encouraged. However, in this paper, the establishment of early warning system "based on space weather monitoring" is not very consistent with the aim of journal.
2) There are some unreasonable and rigorous expressions in the paper. For example, in the main text, the author mentioned the article (Wickramasinghe et al. 2019 Curr. Sci.) that said that the next pandemic is expected to occur between July 2019 and September 2020. The authors believe that emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak uncannily confirms the accuracy of their early warning. However, such speculation is not rigorous and scientific, there is not enough evidence to suggest that "the next pandemic" is the COVID-19 outbreak. It is not enough just by coincidence of time.
3) This paper was based on the author's own theory "the space ray theory of newly emerging toxic infectious diseases", but these are still conjectures now, or there is not enough scientific evidence to support those views. There is no strong experimental data or evidence to support the argument that monitoring solar activity can directly predict the occurrence of new infectious diseases, and radiation from space can lead to virus outbreaks.
Therefore, after careful consideration, we decided to request the retraction. We are really sorry [Ed. #childwriting ?] for our decision, but we think it is necessary. We sincerely hope you and other authors can agree and cooperate with the retraction procedure.
We will soon submit the retraction application to Wiley for review and approval, and then start the retraction process.
Finally, thank you very much for your contribution to our journal.
Sincerely,
MedComm Editorial Office
From: Chandra Wickramasinghe <ncwick@gmail.com>
Reply to: <ncwick@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, 6 October 2020 at 11:51 pm
To: Medcomm editorial office <editorial@med-comm.org>, 曲江文 <qujiangwen1122@126.com>, Ted Steele <ejsteele@cyo.edu.au>, Reg Gorczynski <reggorczynski@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Important - Request for retraction
Editorial Office, MedComm
Dear Sir or Madam,
I absolutely refuse to voluntarily retract this paper which was reviewed by your journal and accepted without any precondition or hesitation. I refute the claim that the arguments presented in the paper are without scientific foundation, nor that it has no medical implications. Your letter reflects an alarming trend in journals like yours that evidently respond to reactions of certain individuals who find any arguments that challenge a reigning orthodoxy so distasteful that they should be hidden from your readers.
Yours in disgust,
~Chandra Wickramasinghe
Link to the Published but spiked: Covid is from space article
Comment: Nothing in this indicates there's any kind of racist motivations, but none the less, it's pretty dodgy. Let's just request retractions for every paper with theories we don't like, shall we?
See also:
shitloadlot of stuff floating around, from individual ion- and electron-sized bits up to the afore-mentioned dust, and on up to planets and stars. It also turns out that some of the very small bits comprise a wide variety of molecular matter, including apparent life-forms. Earth passes through orbital trails of stuff regularly - for example, the so-called Taurid meteor "stream", which is quite a lot of material filling up an "orbit" that is basically a tube some 35,000,000 miles across. That orbit crosses our own in two places - one of them at the location in ours which we call late May and early June, and the other corresponding to late October/early November. Because Earth is moving along its orbit at about 67,000 MPH, it takes us about three weeks to pass through the stuff in the stream. I like to think of the Taurid stream as being like a big bicycle tire tube, 35,000,000 miles across, with rocks a gravel swirling around inside it. Those two periods, May-June and October-November, see literally thousands of tons of stuff from the Taurid stream falling onto Earth. There is no good reason to dismiss the possibility of some of that material being life-forms such as bacteria and viruses. I'm on board with Chandra.