Comment of a critical review about the origins of SARS-CoV-2

This manuscript was submitted as a “Letter to the Editor”  to Cell on October 31, 2021, to address some issues with the article "The origins of SARS-CoV-2: A critical review" published by Holmes, E.C. et al. (2021) in Cell (184, 4848-4856, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.08.017). 

Our Letter discusses logical flaws, missing information and interpretation biases of Holmes’ “Critical review”, provides complementary information and considers alternative ways of interpreting the available data.

The editors refused to send it to reviewers, rejected it on Nov 5, 2021 (and confirmed on Nov 29), invoking that it “does not raise new points”, and that “the same points have, for the most part, previously been raised through other avenues”. Indeed, the points we raised have been discussed elsewhere but some of them have never been mentioned in peer-reviewed articles (but only in institutional reports, press and other media, which we cite in our “Web Resources”section). Note that the points of Holme’s “Critical Review” had also been raised earlier through other avenues. In addition, we took a critical look at some facts that were imprecisely presented in the Holmes paper.

The Cell editors wrote: “you are certainly welcome to raise your points in another scientific journal”. We however think that journals like Cell should publish responses to their publications in their own columns, in order to provide their readership with a comprehensive discussion of all the scientific arguments, and should favour an open scientific debate rather than promoting a single point of view. 

Following Cell's refusal to publish our Letter we decided to release it via this public archive. We also posted it as a Comment on Cell's web site, which was approved by Cell's editor on December 18, 2021, and assigned a direct short link  (http://disq.us/p/2ley7ak). However,  in May 2022 we noticed that the comment had disappeared from Cell's web site (and the short link now points towards the head of Holme's review). We reported this to Cell's editor, who answered that "Cell Press recently decided to discontinue the commenting function on cell.com, partly due to the lack of usage and engagement.", and suggested us to post this comment on a blog or platform like Twitter.