Amulets may prevent COVID-19, says a paper in Elsevier journal. (They don’t.)

The paper’s graphical abstract

Sometimes, we just don’t know what to say.

So we’ll let the people of Twitter comment on a paper titled “Can Traditional Chinese Medicine provide insights into controlling the COVID-19 pandemic: Serpentinization-induced lithospheric long-wavelength magnetic anomalies in Proterozoic bedrocks in a weakened geomagnetic field mediate the aberrant transformation of biogenic molecules in COVID-19 via magnetic catalysis,” claiming that

Nephrite-Jade amulets, a calcium-ferromagnesian silicate, may prevent COVID-19.

The paper appears in Science of the Total Environment, an Elsevier title.

We asked Moses Turkle Bility, a Pitt professor who is listed as corresponding author of the paper, whether he in fact wrote it. He confirmed that he did:

…I kindly suggest you read the article and examine the evidence provided. I also suggest you read the history of science and how zealots have consistently attempted to block and ridicule novel ideas that challenge the predominant paradigm from individuals that are deem not intelligent enough. I not surprised that this article has elicited angry responses. Clearly the idea that a black scientist can provide a paradigm shifting idea offends a lot of individuals. I’ll be very candid with you; my skin color has no bearing on my intelligence.

If you have legitimate concerns about the article and wish to discuss, I’ll address; however, I will not tolerate racism or intellectual intolerance targeted at me.

We asked Bility for evidence that “Nephrite-Jade amulets, a calcium-ferromagnesian silicate, may prevent COVID-19,” and whether promoting non-evidence-based interventions during a pandemic was a good idea. His non-answer:

Dear Dr. Oransky, please read and understand the article in its entirety, before you make a hasty decision. If I may speculate, you neither understand quantum physics nor spin chemistry; you are making a hasting decision based on your knowledge of the classical theories that dominate the biological sciences. Also, certainly you being a white male offers you the privilege to think that you have the right to determine who can propose ideas that challenges a dominant paradigm. Other cultures are not primitive, and people of color and indigenous people are not intellectually inferior. Before you jump to conclusions about this article, I suggest you understand quantum physics, and spin chemistry, and how it differs from classical theories, and then read my article. 

[We’ve had requests to see this entire exchange, because of questions about whether Bility is at Pitt (see comments below), among others. Here it is.]

We’ve also asked Jay Gan, of the University of California, Riverside, and co-editor-in-chief of the journal, how it came to be published. Gan told us that Damià Barceló, the other editor in chief of the journal, handled the submission.

Barceló told us:

The paper   went through our standard reviewing process. It was  reviewed by two expert reviewers and only after  several revisions with the agreement of the reviewers it was accepted.

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81 thoughts on “Amulets may prevent COVID-19, says a paper in Elsevier journal. (They don’t.)”

  1. The worst part of this for me is not the amulets…if an amulet works, that’s great! Weird and unexpected, but if you can prove it in real trials, fine. What gets me is that these authors at a respected university, and in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, no less (!!), begin with the assumption that exogenous viruses do not cause COVID-19. Instead, it is the result, they say, of “magnetic catalysis of iron oxides-silicate-like minerals from biogenic molecules and the coronavirus from endogenous viral elements.” That, my friends, is what we call virus denialism. There is no shred of evidence for this.

    1. But there is!! Read the paper! They had sterile(!!!) lab rats they were using for other projects that developed covid-like symptoms. I suggest you read the paper

      1. They were trying to keep the rats sterile. The simplest explanation is that the colony was contaminated, not that germ theory itself is wrong.

  2. I had posted a couple of add-on concerns about this paper on PubPeer earlier today. It wasn’t until I read this article that I learned that Dr. Bility is Black. His novel (read: ludicrous) claims in this paper should be alarming to Pitt and hopefully will be addressed before he receives tenure, – and that harsh opinion too has nothing to do with race.

    An aside: his personal statement on the Pitt website manages to use the word “elucidate” 4 times in 1 paragraph.

  3. That rat colony which got a covid-19 like infection as a result of these magnetic anomalies was part of a group that “within the colony, some animals were used to construct humanized rats for unrelated studies.” Section 2.1

    What was this research trying to do when they were injecting rats with fetal stem cells and human skin to hummanize them. Is normal description of this kind of research.

    1. Nor did it catch this in the same sentence: “exhibit silicate/glass-like (hyaline) and iron oxides-like deposits”. Guess none of the authors have any radiology or physiology training…
      Though I admit that mineral deposits in lungs and kidneys would probably explain covid19-mortality.

      1. When radiologists talk about ground glass opacity they mean it just looks like ground glass on the x-ray- not that it is literally ground glass, right?

      2. The “iron oxide-like” deposits in the organs sound like hemosiderin to me. A known pathological finding in the setting of severe disease, especially frankly hemorrhagic disease like these rats seem to have had.

  4. Wow.

    “Most important, the proposed hypothesis meets the criteria of a robust scientific hypothesis… 4) it does not employ logical fallacies that appeal to emotion (i.e., sociopolitical-cultural affiliation) or authority (i.e., status within society).”

    While also framing as “based on an approximately 7000–6000 years old knowledge system (Hemudu and Majiabang-Traditional Chinese Medicine).”

    Among other insanities.

  5. The problem with the paper is the selection of Nephrite-Jade.

    Everybody that Nephrite-Jade doesn’t work!!! You can only use Nephrite-Copper, or Cotton-Candy.

    Sheesh!!!

  6. White people are racist for criticizing a black man’s appropriation of Chinese pseudoscience? Cool

    Can this get any more 2020?

    1. Has the author considered the possibility that the ‘humanised skin’ in that study was not the result of the xenotransplants, but rather of the DNA and proteins within mouse tissue transforming into human equivalents under the influence of lithospheric long-wavelength magnetic anomalies in Proterozoic bedrocks in a weakened geomagnetic field?

      This is a potential confounding factor.

      1. It says right there – Elsevier journal. Not only this opus wasn’t published in one of the “Nature journals” (those have the word “Nature” in the title), Nature journals are published by Nature Research, a part of Springer- Nature. Elsevier publishes Cell group of journals, among others.

          1. Half of the shark stays. That isn’t a Nature journal either. But it is published by Springer Nature.

    2. Do you object to the use of the term “humanised” for animal models like these or am I missing something? A quick search shows it’s frequently used. Thanks.

  7. This “paper” is a shame. It would fit much better in a “sorccery and shamanistic advances in guestimation” -like journal.

  8. It’s worrying that the answer shows pointless victimism and strawman arguments. First of all, who knew he was a black scientist before realizing that this paper is quackery and commenting it? I didn’t even know that when I first saw this article. Furthermore, if a black scientist hypothetically stated that the Earth is flat and white people criticized him/her, that wouldn’t change that the Earth is a globe (with tons of immediately available, easily comprehensible evidence about it). Pseudoscience is still pseudoscience, regardless of the actors in play.

    1. Amen! I had no idea he was black either. Then he goes into a monologue about not answering questions about race, but about the “science,” in which he continues to argue his race anyway

    1. Important observation that suggests further ethics issues.

      According to
      https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/publishing-ethics
      “The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others, that this has been appropriately cited or quoted and permission has been obtained where necessary.”

      Although I’m not sure the image is part of the NOAA Photo Library per se, this is probably the right guidance for re-using any NOAA images:
      “Requests from entities such as publishers to sign over copyright privileges for publication purposes are unnecessary. If using an image, please credit NOAA and photographer, if noted, as well as their affiliated organization.”
      https://photolib.noaa.gov/About

      Yet the article itself, in contradiction, claims it is “© 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.”

      It seems the publisher’s ethics guidelines were violated, which the authors are asked to assert they have not violated, as part of the submission process at Elsevier. (At least I’m always asked to certify understanding and adherence to their publishing ethics, when I submit to Elsevier.) It is my understanding, then, that providing false guarantees here violates the author-publisher agreement, and thus the publisher can retract the manuscript simply on these legal grounds.

  9. You can find a list of preprints by the first author of this paper under a slightly modified name in Research Gate:

    https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Musa_Bility

    In this page his current affiliation is not U. Pittsburg, but

    Independent Research Program
    Position
    Philosopher/Professor/Military Officer

    Among other preprints you find the following titles:

    Stonehenge as a public health intervention device for preventing lithospheric magnetic field-induced emerging diseases and megadeath during periods of severely weaken geomagnetic field

    The spatiotemporal relationship between geomagnetic perturbations and Ebola Viral Disease outbreaks and civil strife in Equatorial Africa: A reexamination of the interpretation of clay burning by Iron Age African tribes during severe geomagnetic perturbations

    Are rises in the Lithosphere-Magnetic Field in the United States, interacting with vaping aerosols-iron in lungs, the tipping point for the outbreak of vaping-associated acute lung injury?

    1. If this is the same person, then he is breaking the terms of service of Researchgate and should be removed. From the first paragraph:

      “You must therefore provide only true and non-misleading statements and use your real name; you may not use pseudonyms or pen names. You may not accept, adopt, or post content that falsely or misleadingly implies an incorrect identity, inaccurate biographical facts, or misleading information about your research, qualifications, work experience, awarded grants, or achievements.”

      Since Musa T. Bility appears nowhere else on the internet apart from here, it seems highly probable that it is just a pseudonym for Moses.

      1. Musa may simply be a translation of Moses or vice versa, something we accept without issue when it comes to royalty so why not for regular people?

        This is in no way a defence of the contents of Bility’s writings.

  10. Did I miss the figure where they actually present evidence that the jade amulets do anything at all? Do they have a separate colony where the rats wear jade amulets? I don’t see any data with jade amulets or the negative control, regular green rock amulets?

    1. No, you didn’t miss it. Rats got sick in one room while rats did not get sick in the room next door. That’s it. The difference between rats’ health in two adjacent rooms actually argues against the idea that the Earth’s magnetic field and groundwater differences are responsible for COVID-19. But this is not a science paper. It’s pseudo-intellectual syncretism that makes “Chariot of the Gods” look like a clinical trial.

      1. I think I was too engrossed in trying to follow the logical leap of “COVID-19 hasn’t hit Africa as hard as expected” to “therefore all of germ theory is invalidated” to realize they looked at rats in two different rooms.

  11. This!

    I was curious about the person who handled such a paper and decided to let it fly (Damià Barceló). In a quick search on the journal’s page, I saw that the guy who handled the paper (also a co-editor-in-chief for the journal) has published himself nothing less than 49 (!!) papers in the same journal since 2018. If you go back to 2015, he has published more than 90 (!!!!!) papers in STOTEN.
    Just search for him as an author on the journal’s webpage.

    Feels like this thing will only get worse the more people look at all aspects around this paper…

  12. Science of Total Environment sounds like something The Onion would come up with, not Elsevier. That’s what happens when MBAs take over publishing; brains are heading to the exit and IQ hits the floor. As for the author’s claim that the criticism is somehow racist, that wouldn’t fly. Moreover, this bogus claim implicitly associating bad science with being Black is going against everything #blackinstem stands for. A desperate misdirection on the account of the bruised ego that actually hurts the cause.

  13. Ivan, if you or your associates have time, it might be interesting to see if Pitt will confirm whether Dr. Bility is still with the university.

      1. Vives Santa Eulalia, E. noted above that his Researchgate profile does not show Pitt; I did not separately confirm. If the email address still works that suggests he is still with Pitt, at least to me.

        1. I reached out to the department chair and co-chair. They state simply that they (or the university) are looking into the matter, but nothing more. The corresponding author is still with the university, at least as far as his colleagues know. The last two (senior) authors have not responded to my outreach. Their previous publication records do not indicate a skepticism of “germ theory,” so perhaps they can still shrug this off professionally. This is a damaging event all around, though, and since it is now clear that the roots of this go back at least to the author’s graduate stage (when he says he invented this “theory”), it seems that the department and search committee did not do their due diligence. I fear that missteps of this magnitude call for leadership change and a review of search committee procedures.

        2. This is just wrong. Many universities, most in my experience, provide an email address “alumni” benefit for ex- faculty, staff and students. The way to unambiguously determine whether he is employed by Pittsburgh is to ask them directly.

      2. The double identity on Researchgate (Moses/Musa) T. Bility is confusing the issue, since Musa, the physicist, does not mention any academic affiliation. Or any other biographical details, apart from “military officer”.

        As I pointed out above, if these are the same person, then he should be booted off Researchgate for breaking the terms of service that he signed.

        1. “Musa” from ResearchGate has the same profile picture than “Moses” in Twitter (@BilityMoses). Since “Moses” is the first author of the paper we can conclude they are the same person.

  14. For Musy Bility fans (and there are, well, zero of them) you gotta read this paragraph:

    The theory of everything: Reconciliation of quantum theory and gravitation via redefinition of the concept time in a non-discrete compressible fluid model of the physical universe with interactions governed by the framework of the Wheeler-Feynman-Cramer-Mead transactional (handshake) theory
    Preprint

    Preprint

    1. What wonderful post-modernism, dairrheal verbiage!
      The title of the published article is truly a collectable piece of the same :-):-)

    2. Cramer & Mead’s transactional interpretation of quantum theory is a legit extension of Wheeler. This preprint might be an over-reach, but the title makes sense.

  15. I suspect the main author of this crazy paper is Dr. Jean Nachega. He is a well-regarded AIDS researcher with an h-score of 56 and over 20,000 citations. He recently moved to Pitt after working at Johns Hopkins for years. None of the other authors have published anything, according to the indexing service provided by Elsevier. After poring over it for an hour (it is effectively unreadable), I can’t believe this paper was published… it’s as if someone upended a recycling bin full of random reprints & tried to write a paper citing all of them. It is pure poppycock. Maybe it was accepted on the strength of Nachega’s past work… an h-score of 56 is really outstanding. Someone at Pitt needs to address this.

    1. Do you have any evidence at all for that accusation? It is not right to start dropping names and associating potentially innocent researchers with an issue like this. I suggest you remove the name of the researcher you referred to unless you have some other evidence.

      Not my field, but with regard to the content of the article, I do agree.

      1. Well, given that Dr. Jean Nachega is one of the authors of the paper (the last author, no less), unless his name was used without his explicit consent it would seem that he is involved in this paper.

        Not my field, but I just spent an hour reading through the paper and found it not only confusingly written, but it also seems to me there are a lot of claims and correlations brought forward without much actual evidence.

        If there’s any truth to the author’s findings, they should present some stronger evidence than from the two rat groups. Muddying the water with low-evidence pseudoscience during a pandemic seems counterproductive to me.

        1. I find it very hard to believe all authors consented to this but you’re right. And yes this really isn’t the time for this sort of nonsense.

          1. I stated above that I had not contacted by not heard back from the senior co-authors. Dr. Nachega has since reached out to say that he did not fulfill any of the ICMJE criteria for authorship and should not have listed as a co-author. He characterizes this as an honest mistake (I guess by the corresponding author?). He emphasizes that he had seen the manuscript but told Bility that although it was outside his (Nachega’s) area of expertise, more evidence was needed to support the claims.

            Nachega also states that he has now requested that the paper be retracted and that he not be listed again should the author resubmit elsewhere.

            I think this is the right response from someone who is clearly a very busy and prolific academic. His presence on the paper may have propped it up, as suggested before, but it was not his intent to do this. But a good reminder to all of us to be extra careful about how our actions or inactions can support dangerous virus denialism.

    2. Bility’s material on researchgate.com and academia.edu makes it seem likely that he was the prime mover for this paper. The weird thing is that he got 9 of his colleagues to put their names on it.

        1. And from what Kenneth Witwer writes above, it sounds like at least one of those didn’t consent to being on the paper.

  16. Was the paper reviewed by a geologist? The big correlation with Proterozoic cratons is outrageous to any geologist, as we know that the Proterozoic Eon lasted from 2500 to 540 million years ago. That’s about half of earth history. And a great proportion of the exposed crust of this age (the vast majority in fact) is NOT lithospheric mantle peridotite. Infuriating.

    1. The correlation of COVID-19 with Proterozoic cratons is poor (much of Africa, Australia and India is composed of Proterozoic cratons); there was a better correlation with Phanerozoic mobile belts – until the US’s third wave, from Montana to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is sitting on a craton. Considering the the same geological structures are found in both Brazil and Africa it doesn’t seem a valid explanation why Brazil and tropical Africa have had very different outcomes.

      It is not clear to me what the actual prediction is; the abstract leads one to expect a predicted correlation with cratons, but the text then refers to the Alpine-Himalayan orogeny.

  17. The article website https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720363592#s0100 holds the following statement (as of Nov 1st):

    “CRediT authorship contribution statement
    Moses Turkle Bility: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Visualization, Investigation, Supervision, Writing-Original draft preparation, Reviewing and Editing; Sara Ho: Data curation, Writing-Reviewing, and Editing; Yash Agarwal: Data curation, Writing-Reviewing, and Editing; Isabella Castronova: Data curation, Writing-Reviewing, and Editing; Cole Beatty: Data curation, Writing-Reviewing, and Editing; Shivkumar Biradar: Data curation, Writing-Reviewing, and Editing; Vanshika Narala: Data curation, Writing-Reviewing, and Editing; Nivitha Periyapatna: Data curation, Writing-Reviewing, and Editing; Yue Chen: Investigation;
    Jean Nachega: Investigation, Writing-Reviewing, and Editing.”

    So whatever happened is not an honest mistake.

    Either the submitter lied about the contribution of the other authors (including Jean Nachega), or Jean Nachega is lying now to protect himself.

    Has anyone here published in “Science and the Total Environment”? How do they handle submissions?

    – Do they send an email to all listed authors on submission. Can you just put someone on as an author without them knowing about it?

    – Moses Turkle Bility is listed as the corresponding author. Does that mean that he submitted the article? (Often it is just a checkbox, so someone else might have submitted)

  18. I’m horrified that I also have a paper in press with this journal.

    All authors were cc’d in my correspondence to and from the associate editor.

    1. That is an unfortunate situation for you, I am sorry to hear. On the other hand, I think this event will be swept under the rug swiftly and other contributors to this journal won’t be affected at all.

      In this situation, no one wants to rock the boat, there are no parties that have any personal stake in resolving this issue, nothing will ever happen.

      Pittsburgh university is not going to want to explain why they hired obviously incompetent faculty, and JN already has an excuse that he did not meet the co-authorship criteria and that it was an honest mistake, see comment from Kenneth Witwer above. Maybe he didn’t get cc’ed when the article was submitted.

      Moses Turkle Bilty already pulled the “accuse of write male privilege card”, so this is too hot to touch for anyone white or male.

      Probably they won’t even retract it, but make the article just disappear instead.

  19. Just a comment to the submission process at STOTEN: each and every co-author gets an automated email and has to confirm their co-authorship on the journal’s website. Went through that process myself, just a couple of days ago.

    So, no “honest mistake”. If it was a mistake at all, that it was the typical “cool, I can a free ride” co-authorship by a pseudo-productive senior scientist how never read the manuscript he co-authored.

    1. Well, I guess the submitting author (probably Bility) could have invented fake emails for (some of the) other authors. That has happened many times before. But yes, I do think we need an explanation from all of the authors.

  20. They claim their hypothesis come from Traditional Chinese Medicine, yet I don’t see any discussion of how jade is supposed to interact with ying yang, qi, five elements, and eight meridians. No TCM theory is referenced at all. Instead the paper make all these unsupported claims about quantum physics and spin chemistry. Since the lead author doesn’t appear to have any connection to Chinese culture, I will go ahead and call this cultural misrepresentation.

  21. I wonder who else finds the connection “COVID-like symptoms = COVID infection” ridiculous. I cannot imagine how many diseases have “COVID-like” symptoms and how those symptoms would vary on humans and rats. Before making those claims, perhaps he could have at least taken the time to test for the virus.

  22. Please refer to Figure 6 of this manuscript by Turkle (apparently not published, yet with an assigned DOI):
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337331416_Are_rises_in_the_Lithosphere-Magnetic_Field_in_the_United_States_interacting_with_vaping_aerosols-iron_in_lungs_the_tipping_point_for_the_outbreak_of_vaping-associated_acute_lung_injury?channel=doi&linkId=5dd2a55a4585156b351d31ec&showFulltext=true

    The photo in Figure 6 is virtually identical to photo of Fig. 7B in the polemical paper. In the 2019 manuscript (uploaded on Dec/1/2019, so basically pre-covid), rat lungs show “lipid damage and magnetite-granitoids”. In the 2020 (published) paper, the same lungs are “COVID-19-like lungs in rats”…. Interesting …
    In addition to that, is clear that the paper has not apparently been reviewed by any geologist /geophysicist.

  23. The Scientist article from yesterday provides lots of details for those who would prefer not to read the actual “amulet-paper” in question (for fear of mental contamination, a particular paranoia of mine– just kidding.)

    Also, wasn’t vaping injury thought to be secondary to use of vitamin E as a solvent?

    Not that it’s particularly relevant, but the poor rats who started this odyssey of error need to have their ghosts put to rest by some zoologist or possibly a rat epidemiologist… what did they really die of? (not my field, but I’m guessing a rat pneumonia virus.)

  24. https://www.academia.edu/38136299/The_theory_of_everything_Reconciliation_of_quantum_theory_and_gravitation_via_redefinition_of_the_concept_time_in_a_non_discrete_compressible_fluid_model_of_the_physical_universe_with_interactions_governed_by_the_framework_of_the_Wheeler_Feynman_Cramer_Mead_transactional_handshake_theory

    Contains some unorthodox ideas (to put it politely):
    “The social-political polarization of The United States is broadly demarcated as democrat-liberal and republican conservative; thus The United States is a bi-polarized social-political structure [30]. D. Schreiber et al, 2013, demonstrated that democrats-liberals and republicans-conservatives exhibit polarized “brain” electromagnetic
    interactions (brain activity) in high-risk decision making; thus suggesting that democrats-liberals and republicans-conservatives exhibit polarized electromagnetic interactions [30]. The social-political polarization of the United States in the late 1960s to the late 1970s underwent significant shifts (oscillations between democrats and republicans) within the Southern United States [31]. Per equilibrium theory, we hypothesize that the structure and dynamics of the social-political polarization of The United States in the late 1960s to the late 1970s is symmetrical to the structure and dynamics of the lithosphere-magnetic field polarization of The United States in the late 1960s [32] to the late 1970s [33, 34]”.

    “The symmetrical relationship between the social-political polarization and magnetic field polarization of the lithosphere demonstrate that humans exist as a demarcated compressible
    fluid with “quantum” electromagnetic interactions (human interactions) govern by the framework of the Wheeler-Feynman-Cramer-Mead transactional (quantum handshake) theory. Furthermore, said symmetrical relationship between the social-political polarization and magnetic field polarization of the lithosphere demonstrate that humans populations (including the global human population) and associated dynamics/interactions can be demarcated as a “quantum dynamical” field. “

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