The fake news on HIV in Covid is back: hoaxes die hard

Exactly three years ago, at the beginning of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic, it appeared a preprint that supported the presence of HIV sequences within the genome of what was then a new coronavirus. The scientific community, including myself, immediately realized that the preprint in question was substantially rubbish, because the conclusions drawn were simply not supported by the data described; and despite the vigorous intervention in support of the hoax that correlated HIV and Sars-CoV-2 by a now deceased Nobel laureate, the same Indian authors of the original study requested and obtained an immediate retraction, writing that they intended to revise it following the numerous criticisms received. Since then, the original research group has not been heard from again, and that preprint is therefore officially waste paper; but, as often happens also for scientific articles withdrawn for fraud and errors, both the idea and the text itself continue to plague the public debate and generate new discussions and new preprintsused to pretend that the issue hasn’t already been addressed and resolved once and for all.

Thus, just in these days, three years after the solution of the case, more rubbish flows from the inexhaustible source constituted by world conspiracy, and in this case, as unfortunately happens more and more often, from the pen of someone who, at least in words, should be an expert. One Theodor-Nicolae Carp, apparently affiliated with the University of Westminster, has released a preprint whose text resembles a stream of free thought for somehow reiterate the old and immortal hoax that would link HIV and Sars-CoV-2and to suggest as a result of this report and based on some of his bizarre verbal associations that current vaccines should be withdrawn from the market and replaced with something else.

I have no interest in pursuing yet again the weary repetition of something that has already been disproven, even by its own original proponents; however, I am interested here to underline the long-term damage that a scientific document, not only an article but also a preprint, can do even and despite having been withdrawn, even with the consent of the authors. Coincidentally, just in February, but four years ago, I published a work in which I demonstrated the persistence in the scientific literature, in the form of references and citations, of scientific articles that had been withdrawn for fraud, error or plagiarism; I called these monsters immortal among scientific publications “zombie papers”and I called “Frankstein doctors” the authors who consciously continued to support them with subsequent and more recent publications – as Carp does today for the publication retracted three years ago by the Indians.

I wrote then that “the damages of reporting as valid data withdrawn for manipulation, completely ignoring the retraction of a document, are immediately evident: a socially important issue, which has already been resolved by science, is reported as still open to debate”. And that’s exactly the point: old stories continually rehashed and spit out as if they were newmoreover not only pretending that the scientific community hasn’t already solved a question, but precisely by accusing the researchers of not wanting to answer (because obviously they don’t answer indefinitely to the reiterations of the same nonsense) and, taking advantage of the obvious silence that welcomes those who stupidly continue to insist on something that has already been denied, even accusing them of not answering because they want to hide something, that is, because one cannot answer.

I have abused the reader’s patience so far not to discuss the specific case, but only to warn him once again before accepting the conspiracy theory just illustrated: it is a well-proven systemwhich will always be used by those who attack the community and scientific knowledge itself, and which, paying a little attention, can be discovered in thousands and thousands of proponents of anti-science.