The “invented persona” behind the GISAID viral sequence database

https://www.science.org/content/article/invented-persona-behind-key-pandemic-database

by Metacelsus • 3 years ago

103 46 3 years ago

Metacelsus• 3 years ago

It's interesting that a person without any background in biology (Peter Bogner) was able to start a sequence database that has now become critical infrastructure for public health.

But it seems like GISAID has outgrown his ability to lead it, and it would be good to transition to more responsible leadership.

glofish4• 3 years ago

It is because the person is evidently a con-man.

So it is not as much "interesting" but "illuminating" that supposedly smart people like scientists can be just as easily mislead as the random person responding to an email scam.

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

Everybody, without exception, can be conned. Smart people are no more resistant to it than anyone else.

Accujack• 3 years ago

I'd say being a confidence man is secondary. Primarily, he seems to have some sort of mental illness. He's paranoid, and seems quite unstable. It's likely he has delusions of grandeur and considers himself a major force behind saving millions or billions from COVID.

I suspect if pushed to replace himself as governance for GISAID (which I suspect he controls alone... I doubt the mentioned technical or governance boards exist) he may well lock off all access to the data that's accumulated or even delete it to prevent someone from taking it from him.

22535392423• 3 years ago

epups• 3 years ago

What a weirdo. Unclear what sort of benefit he is extracting from this though, certainly not money. And if he wants attribution/fame so bad, why create a fake identity?

glofish4• 3 years ago

Almost certainly is all about money.

How would you know how the millions of dollars sent to the organization are being spent?

For starters he is impersonating another director of the organization - right there probably pulling in two leadership salaries for a start. How many other fake employees are there?

Then he is most likely the sole decider on how that money is spent ... the article shows that he is a convicted grifter that spent time in jail for fleecing people ...

YeBanKo3• 3 years ago

I am pretty sure these workshops [1] they host aren’t free to participate in.

[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/14-12-2022-gisaid-and-who-glob...

glofish4• 3 years ago

Millions of dollars flow to an organization headed by a convicted fraudster ... rest assured there are much more efficient ways to divert those funds than workshops

If anything the workshops are legit front.

longerd• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the 'ReceptioGate' scandal, where amongst other weird and dodgy behaviour, a medieval manuscript researcher, Carla Rossi, had invented an entire set of staff for her online research institute and was even emailing people from a pseudonym: https://thecritic.co.uk/receptiogate-and-the-absolute-state-...

(Previously seen on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34123302)

oh_sigh• 3 years ago

Wow, what an amazing turn to the story. The last I heard about it, we were just dealing with a plagiarizing academic and a rude assistant.

YeBanKo3• 3 years ago

If things described in this article are true, the the person running GISAID is a conman. WHO and other health orgs uses GISAID’s EpiFlu database to make a recommendation for which strains to use for next flu vaccines. Seems wild that an org ran by a conman has such an impact on the healthcare worldwide.

tough• 3 years ago

Almost like its cons all the way down

dekhn2• 3 years ago

I've seen women who do email support roles use an invented persona with a man's name. The one time I asked, the person explained that when they used their own name, they received a fair amount of unwanted attention which went away when they switched to a man's name.

daveguy• 3 years ago

What industry, if you don't mind me asking?

dekhn2• 3 years ago

pretty much the same one as GISAID- there are a bunch of people who do email support for genomics databases. Also cloud email support and tech documentation

to11mtm• 3 years ago

I remember a conversation with my (now) Ex-wife when we started playing an MMO together regarding her nickname;

They would use a name that was vaguely ambiguous on gender but was far more likely to be considered Male than female, and it was for similar-ish reasons. They would still get some harassers occasionally (usually someone who found out they were female in guild chat... which was thankfully dealt with swiftly by leaders. [0])

[0]- Which, semi-related to the topic, was often instigated by finding out they were my partner!

mutagen• 3 years ago

Along these lines, nearly 20 years ago in World of Warcraft I made a female human character with a slightly unconventional combination of features and received gender related comments on the character's appearance by the time the character got to Westfall (relatively low level area).

revelio2• 3 years ago

How is that in any way related to the accusations here, in which a man is accused of using a man's name?

mikeyouse2• 3 years ago

Bill Gates' team and other global health experts have been pushing for a truly open sequence database for awhile now -- GISAID of course has been freaking out and threatening litigation all over the place for every perceived slight.

Then there was the other scandal of late, Martin Enserink wrote about that one too (https://www.science.org/content/article/dispute-simmers-over...). Basically GISAID claimed they were the first to publish the original Covid genome, when nobody at all remembers it like that and all of the contemperaneous reports credit Eddie Holmes and the courageous Chinese Zhang Yong-Zhen who published that first sequence on Virological days before GISAID/WHO released theirs. GISAID has gone so far as to backdate their original blog posts to establish 'evidence' for the date of publication. They've also threatened litigation for people who claim that the Virological post preceded their publication..

Something is seriously wrong over there.

YeBanKo3• 3 years ago

I am not familiar with how GISAID works, but there any sort of signature that authenticates data and ensure integrity. If they backdated the post, could they also tempered with sequences data?

mikeyouse2• 3 years ago

They can definitely mess with the sequence metadata (date submitted, date published, authors, etc) - but they primarily host NGS sequences which can trivially be verified against the original sequencing runs maintained by the researchers, so it's pretty unlikely they've ever tampered with actual genomic data.

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

Gates wants open sequence data for his closed vaccine companies to profit from.

revelio2• 3 years ago

The whole field of virology seems totally messed up not just this one organization. These accusations are hardly a surprise given the bizarre behavior and culture of deception that seems to pervade the field. So many virologists were willing to sign that notorious Daszak open letter that was blatantly pseudo-scientific and the result of a genuine conspiracy. Where were the objectors?

The article has quotes like this:

many flu scientists hesitated to share newly sequenced influenza genomes, concerned that rivals would skim the most interesting data and publish a paper first

and

Indonesia stopped sharing H5N1 samples with the world in 2007 over concerns that foreign scientists were describing a virus from Indonesia without proper credit

The whole point of giving these people government funding is because they claim it'll let them focus exclusively on noble humanitarian goals, yet here they are acting like tabloid journalists.

and

GISAID has many stalwart supporters. “I’ve known Peter for a number of years, and his push for ‘equitable sharing’ has helped the database, scientists, and the health of humans and animals around the world,” says virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center, who co-chairs GISAID’s Scientific Advisory Council

Equitable sharing seems to be about what you'd expect [1], Should data sharing in epidemics and pandemics primarily advance utility, or should it advance equity as well?

Can anything they say be trusted? How many screwed up public health institutions are out there exactly? Why do we fund these people??

[1] https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s129...

RobotToaster• 3 years ago

The whole field of medical research seems pretty messed up, given the perverse incentives the grant system and privatised pharmaceutical industry create.

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

Is it normal to directly link to a scam website in the first paragraph, before exposing the scam?

jokowueu• 3 years ago

What are the dangers ?

http://www.gisaid.org/

Its here now , did I scare you ?

im3w1l• 3 years ago

So basically the reason people use this database in the first place is to work around the skewed incentives of academia where papers are everything and contributing the labwork of finding a sequence is seen as worthless.

mannyv• 3 years ago

As far as anyone knows he's a front person for a TLA.

22535392423• 3 years ago

588104

22535392423• 3 years ago

9370537458

jgalt212• 3 years ago

Sort of like every time I get a call from India and caller says his / her name is Dick or Jane?

ricksunny2• 3 years ago

While the provenance of GISAID is sounding murky indeed, (and in that regard this Science Magazine article certainly adds value) anyone following the origins debate on Twitter would see this article (especially its timing & authorship) as just another volley in the reputation war between a small subset of vocal virologists vs. anyone with data / evidence / analyses running counter to their narrative.

Article co-author Jon Cohen comes in with his own murky background in the origins debate (all but outing a whistleblower to Holmes and Andersen in 2020: “Here's what one person who claims to have inside knowledge is saying behind your backs”), as does quoted virologist Marion Koopmans (of the long-since panned WHO-convened origins study trip fame) and evolutionary biologist Kristian G Andersen's group (KGA was lead author of the now overtly infamous Proximal Origins paper in Nature Medicine).

As the article opens with, GISAID restricted access to French CNRS researcher Florence Debarre after publicizing following downloading the raccoon dog sample + SC2 sample data from GISAID that was uploaded by the Gao team of researchers. (Gao, former director of China CDC, asserts that humans carried the virus into the market, not the other way around). Kamil was very vocal on Twitter about the whole kerfuffle.

Getting cut off from such an international database popular with so many scientists was seen as a major reputational slap on the wrist to such an outspoken origins researcher as Debarre. So this article simply serves to take GISAID down a few pegs in its own right (a diminution it certainly sounds like it has earned) mitigating the reputational impact to Debarre.

But bigger picture, the piece is just the latest salvo in the schoolyard dustup that is vocal virologists (and their scribes) jockeying to maintain position. So for all of the status these folks enjoyed in 2020, (when tbe rest of us fearfully turned to any expert for pandemic context with little regard for possible CoI's) it is finally their banal human nature on display that I find utterly disappointing.

(Apologies for any typos, am on mobile.)

ramraj07• 3 years ago

While I see the irony in asking to avoid ad hominem attacks in response to an article that itself is pretty much a large ad hominem attack, do you believe there’s any facts mentioned in there to be suspect? Even the facts in one paragraph of the article would be enough to torpedo a PhD application leave alone the apparently sole arbiter of all viral sequences in the planet.

ricksunny2• 3 years ago

No I have no reason to suspect facts mentioned - like I said I think the article probably adds value in shedding light on a popular database; but that's not my point; the contributors to the article demonstrate the usual coordination & incentives we've come to expect from a small handful of vocal virologists and those who write for them.

The “invented persona” behind the GISAID viral sequence database

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