We agree on that, too.
In this case, we have a different situation, though.
I did not call for banning links to peer-revied science.
I asked (still do) not to share the SCMP piece on the BBS, which is not BB. This is a community thing. Not an editorial/auhor’s piece. FTR, if any of the BB authors/editors shared such a shit piece of corona pop sci, I would be dissapointed and say so express my righteous anger in the comments. 
The article did not include a link to the original publication. It furthermore claimed that there is more evidence, again without a link. And when I checked for that evidence, it was also fishy, and not science. Then I read the short comm and was sceptical.
If the general public is confused, the least I can do is to call out terrible reporting when I take note. In this case, I am also sceptical about the evidence presented in the original publication, and presented my reasoning. I do this stuff here on the community forum as well as with my personal contacts whenever possible. I did this in March
The ‘fact’ that Covid-19 was in France in December already went up and down the newsfeeds. Just try google news:
This is google news. German sources only. I counted: 42 out of them can be considered ‘trusted’ news outlets (:cough: and I even count the Kronen Zeitung amongst those
), the rest is stuff like RT and Sputnik news. This doesn’t fit on one screen.
I stand by my ‘fucking nightmare of a PR disaster’ stance, and I’ll try to explain a bit why I am angry about the press coverage for this study.
I think that the news telling people that Covid-19 was in Europe already in December or even November feeds right into the conspiracy bullshit that this virus came out of a lab, was spread using the international military games, and was already in the population much before the lockdown measures were coming into place everywhere.
Even if you don’t go full nutter on this there will be plenty of people who did have respiratory and other symptoms between November and March. We call it the influenza season, but this is a general respiratory disease season. I was already discussing with people who say they suspect that they already had it in febuary.
With we are right in the middle of the herd immunity discussion which will not be resolved until we test large amounts of people for (I think multiple!) specific IG-G antibodies.
On a personal note:
I was myself in an ER on the 22nd of December after a month of corticosteroids which didn’t help with my cough, and was diagnosed as “we don’t know what’s the reason, but there’s definitely something wrong, you should see a pulmonologist”. I again fell ill on February 20th, I know how it feels to be uncertain about being infected. In Feburary, I knew about the virus already. I actually met my sibling who just had returned from China (not Wuhan) during that period, but after falling ill.
I also know about the uncertainty if I had infected others. After meeting my sibling, and still having one of the worst colds since 2010 (but not with symptoms discussed as differential diagnostic traits) and co-hosted a conference I had helped to organise for >80 people.
Shortly afterwards, some colleagues I had close contact with fell ill with the same symptoms I had. (Which were not like Covid-19, but still hard on them.)
I learned from that. This also influences my perception and reaction to news as well as new scientific evidence in regard to SARS-CoV-2.
I hope this personal note also explains why I am so insistent in my opinion that we should not spread news articles like this one from the South China Morning Post. While I can’t keep up with everything, this case caught my attention quickly.
