Okay, but it's immediately clear that nobody who wrote this paper is knowledgeable about virology or the norms of academic publishing — but they were trying to fake it. Yet the first author is claimed to be a real person who is in fact a virologist with lots of academic publications.

How about Wired? https://www.wired.com/story/an-old-malaria-drug-may-fight-co...

> Except for that video, which hadn’t come out yet, Rigano put all that together and got in touch with Todaro. “I essentially wrote the publication based on my interface with various Stanford researchers and others, and we developed this body of evidence and hardcore science,” Rigano says. “James, Dr. Todaro, was doing the best job, I thought, of anyone in the media, any doctor, any news outlet, anyone on Twitter, of covering coronavirus. I’d been following his research on other items, like decentralized computing, for several years.”

> Todaro, who got an MD from Columbia and is now a bitcoin investor, was interested enough to collaborate on the document. “I added stuff that pertained more to the medical side of things, and gave a more, I guess, clinical feel to it,” Todaro says. “Something that Big Pharma is not going to like—it’s widely available, it’s pretty cheap, and it’s something that at least a million people are already on. It’s really got a lot of the aspects of something that can be rolled out quickly if the right clinical data is there.”

> Todaro and Rigano together started talking to Raoult about the small study he was then preparing, and they also called a retired biochemist named Tom Broker. He was originally listed as the first author of the Google doc, his name followed by “(Stanford).” That’s where Broker got his PhD, in 1972, but Broker has been, for years, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His area of research is adenovirus and human papillomavirus, which have DNA as their genetic material, as opposed to the RNA inside coronaviruses. They’re pretty different.

> Broker says he wasn’t involved in producing the Google doc and would never advocate the use of a drug without formal trials. Todaro and Rigano have since removed his name from it, at Broker’s request. “I neither contributed to, wrote any part of, nor had knowledge of this google.com document. I have never conducted research on RNA virus pathogens … I have no professional credentials or authority to suggest or recommend clinical trials or practices,” Broker wrote in an email. “Apparently I was inserted as a ‘gratuitous’ author, a practice that I have always avoided over my 53-year career. Moreover, I have never engaged any part of social media, privately or professionally. All of my scientific publications are processed through peer review. I suggest that you communicate with one of the actual authors.”

> Asked about Broker’s statement, Todaro says that Broker just didn’t want to engage with the attention the idea and document were getting “I don’t personally know Tom Broker. My correspondence has been with Mr. Rigano,” Todaro says. “When we started getting inquiries from the press, my impression was, Mr. Broker got very overwhelmed by that.”

So, according to Wired, the "paper"'s first author says that its real authors put his name on the paper without his knowledge or consent, which is dishonest (it goes far beyond the usual questionable practice of "gratuitous author" insertion, which places your sponsor as the last author), and that he disagrees with what it says. The "paper" is obviously not the kind of thing a real professor would produce. The real authors say he's lying.

It seems clear to me who's lying here. Wired caught them lying about a lot of other things, too.