Originally published in Bioarxiv as Discovery of a novel coronavirus associated with the recent pneumonia outbreak in humans and its potential bat origin. The comments by Jacob Marley lead me to study this paper in depth, which also took me to Dr Andrew Kaufman's research video. This paper was later published in Nature as follows:

P. Zhou et al., A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin. Nature 2020. Epub 2020 Feb 3.

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The authors of this study took bronchoalveolar-lavage fluid (BALF) from seven persons with severe pneumonia ( six of them were vendors at the Wuhan market), extracted RNA from the samples and ran

Serious shortcomings of this study:

• Doesn't isolate any virus and however proceeds to create a test (about what?) -> 3rd and 4th comments in the PDF above
• The proposed test repeatedly fails -> 5th comment
• Doesn't fulfill Koch's postulates (no connection between virus and disease demonstrated) -> 7th comment
• Is not statistically significant and possibly includes bias -> 8th comment

2] V. D. Menachery et al., A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence. Nat. Med. 21, 1508–1513 (2015).

3] V. D. Menachery et al., SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence, Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 3048–3053 (2016).

The two studies above show that a chimeric version of the SARS virus (bat spike in a mouse backbone) could possibly infect mice expressing human airway cells or the cells themselves. However, while mouse models are useful tools to study diseases, extrapolating mice data to humans has to be done with caution. Many papers in different fields (here some examples: a b c d e ) have shown that doing so could lead to wrong conclusions or treatments. The authors do not present evidence of human infection even though they claim in the abstract of the lowermost paper that "the results indicate that the WIV1-coronavirus (CoV) cluster has the ability to directly infect and may undergo limited transmission in human populations"

4] N. Wang et al., Serological evidence of bat SARS-related coronavirus infection in humans, China. Virol. Sin. 33, 104–107 (2018).

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This study collected serum (saliva, blood and feces) from several patients (240) living close to bat caves. From those, six tested positive with an NP ELISA test tailored for SARS-Cov variants, however, virus neutralization and Western blot tests failed on these same subjects. All in all, no conclusive evidence of viral infection or zoonosis (virus jumping from animal to human host) is presented.

[5] W. B. Park et al., Virus Isolation from the First Patient with SARS-CoV-2 in Korea , J Korean Med Sci. 2020 Feb 24;35(7):e84

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This paper references the paper by Zhou (see above) as the first isolation of SARS-Cov-2. However, as I've shown above, this is not the case. Furthermore the paper doesn't show any isolation protocol for the virus, they just combine the oropharyngeal samples from the patients with viral transport medium without any filtering.

[6] J.-M. Kim et al., Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19 , Osong Public Health Res Perspect 2020;11(1):3-7

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Kim et al. make a false claim by stating that Paraskevis et al. (see article below) identified the causative agent of the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak. Paraskevis et al. article is just a calculation, no experimental proof is shown or referenced!!

[7] D. Paraskevis et al., Full-genome evolutionary analysis of the novel corona virus (2019-nCoV) rejects the hypothesis of emergence as a result of a recent recombination event, Infection, Genetics and Evolution 79 (2020) 104212

This paper presents phylogenetic tree calculations to classify the sequences reported by the flawed papers I've discussed above. These results constitute no proof of SARS-Cov-2 being the causative agent of this worldwide pandemic.

N. Zhu et al. A Novel Coronavirus From Patients With Pneumonia in China, 2019, 2019, N Engl J Med. 2020 Feb 20;382(8):727-733

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L.-L. Ren et al. Identification of a Novel Coronavirus Causing Severe Pneumonia in Human: A Descriptive Study , Chin Med J (Engl). 2020 May 5;133(9):1015-1024

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S. Matsuyama et al. Enhanced isolation of SARS-CoV-2 by TMPRSS2-expressing cells, PNAS March 31, 2020 117 (13) 7001-7003

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These last three studies above use the same procedure as described by Zhou et al. They directly inoculate either Vero or human airway epithelial cells with bronchoalveolar-lavage fluid without first separating (isolating) the virus from the other constituents.

Laboratory testing for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in suspected human cases, Interim guidance 19th March 2020, World Health Organization

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This guideline from the World health organization states that "cross reactivity to other coronaviruses can be challenging" and references the following paper:

[9] B. Meyer et al., Serological assays for emerging coronaviruses: Challenges and pitfalls, Virus Research 194 (2014) 175–183

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This review article highlights many of the issues that serological tests are know to have. Below are some extracts from the text.

In relation to the previous SARS pandemic (SARS-Cov), the article comments:

"In particular, the high seroprevalence in the population of antibodies against the common cold CoV combined with the presence of cross-reactive antibodies against conserved parts of the immunogenic CoV proteins could have contributed to false positive results." In other words, many people tested positive because they had antibodies against the common cold caused by standard corona viruses.

And they previously write:

"more than 90% of the population has antibodies against the common cold CoV (Gorse et al., 2010)"

Which would imply that these tests could have large numbers of false positives.

Also, they conclude along similar lines:

"Despite the large number of assays developed in the aftermath of the outbreak of SARS- and MERS-CoV, serological differentiation of HCoVs remains challenging. Overall, it can be concluded that problems with cross-reactivity are more likely to arise with a more conserved antigen, and will often manifest as false positive results." So, all in all, it can be seen that serological assays are prone to false positives, in particular for conserved antigens, as is the case for the common cold caused by corona viruses.

One of the most important opponents of this and the 2009 pandemic. Throughout his medical career he's been internist, pulmonologist, head of the public health office in Flensburg and member of the parliament for the SPD (Social Democratic Party), where he acted as rapporteur for laws regarding infection protection, transplantation, stem cells, viral infections and drug regulation. His video on this pandemic summarizes the most important point to consider about this pandemic. Furthermore, his website is full of information which shows for example that the total number of deaths in Germany is now decreasing, and much lower than in 2017 or 2018, while the deaths attributed to COVID-19 are increasing. Also in his webpage there are articles about how similar inconsistencies are happening in the UK. To say that he has been defamed by the media is an understatement. Almost all the official news services ( WELT WZ Focus, just a couple of examples) have taken turns to throw dirt at him using straw man arguments or comments without any serious studies to back them up.

Medical doctor specialized in microbiology and infection epidemiology, former professor of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and director of the institute for medical microbiology and medicine (1991-2012), as well as one of the most cited scientists in his field. He sent an open letter to chancellor Angela Merkel with 5 questions about the measures taken during the corona crisis. His letter has been so far ignored.

He leads the Institute of Forensics in the University Clinic in Hamburg and was in charge of making the autopsies for COVID-19 patients. He reported that all the patients who died had one or more severe diseases and qualified the measures taken as disproportionate.

Renowned epidemiologist who formerly headed the department of biostatistics at the Rockefeller University in New York. He showcased in several videos the inefficacy of the social distancing measures and the lack of correlation between their implementation and the infection numbers. He has been misreported by Tagesschau in Germany and some news agencies in the US, and his videos have been censored by youtube

A german lawyer from Heidelberg, specialized in medical and health matters, who sent an urgent petition to the Federal constitutional court of Heidelberg to stop the Corona measures that she qualified as "Coronoia". Her petition was denied, her webpage blocked by the police and she was brought by force to psychiatry.

All the material regarding the corona crisis has been removed from her webpage and she's now listed as absent for an undefined period of time.

Here is the original document from the police of Manheim blocking her webpage for urging people to meet on easter Monday, to protest against the corona measures.

After this situation, she was brought by the police, against her will, to a psychiatric clinic to be interned on 13.04.20. Really? Just because you're calling people to meet up and use one of their constitutional rights? This definitely seems disproportionate to me, and judging by this audio sent to her sister, it was done violently and stealthily like in the worst times of german history. Two days later she was released and delivered a speech in front of the university clinic of Heidelberg, where she described this whole situation using irony and avoiding some keywords (the truth), which could potentially send her back to the clinic or jail.

In her speech, upon being questioned by the public about how she was abruptly taken by the police, she ironically told that she "just got drunk with some friends and then fell from her bike, which explains her head and leg bruises". Also during her speech she mentions how the german constitution has been modified in a span of 2 weeks, and she didn't know that now public demonstrations are considered a criminal act.

Mr Wilfried Schmitz, also a lawyer, wrote an open letter(german) to call for the clarification of her case and encouraged other lawyers to start acting against further developments in this direction. Here's my translation of the letter to english.

One of the most important filmmaking companies exposing the corruption of the World Health Organization with their documentaries and videos. Their Trust WHO documentary was blocked by Vimeo as the Corona pandemic started but can be bought for private use from their website or watched for free in Amazon Prime online. I highly recommend it to understand the corruption levels in the WHO. They also reported about the lies and irregular money flow to favor the drugs Tamiflu and Relenza during the previous Swine Flu pandemic. The full report of the irregularities of the previous pandemic can be found in this video by Tom Jefferson from the Cochrane Institute. In addition, they have created a series of videos called Perspectives on the Pandemic with many experts discussing COVID-19. The episodes of this series involving Dr. Knut Wittkowski have been recently banned by youtube after one of them having almost 1M views.

Medical doctor with background in biology, oncology, hematology and psychiatry. His research on the origin of this pandemic encouraged me to dig deeper in this topic. He has thoroughly discussed all the irregularities surrounding the origin of this SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19) and the previous SARS-Cov pandemic in 2003. Some of the findings presented here are carefully explained in his videos.

Professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health at Stanford University and codirector of the Meta-research Innovation Center also at Stanford. He has repeatedly shown through several studies carried out by his group that the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in Santa Clara County, California is in the standard range for a common seasonal flu. In video by Journeyman Pictures Prof. Ioannidis summarizes his thoughts about this pandemic.