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Comment by Maria Ines Reinert Azambuja
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- CC BY 4.0
Dear Dr. Timothy
Thank you very much for your review, especially for valuing the possibilities of epidemiology and the hypotheses presented in the article for advancing academic knowledge in different areas of research.
I agree with most of your criticisms. I have not yet submitted the article to any journal because I recognize the difficulties you pointed out.
I believe that most of them result from the fact that, at the same time as I present a new hypothesis for the emergence of the COVID-19 Pandemic (time, person, place), I need to build and present a completely new theoretical scenario (another paradigm) in which it fits. I feel like someone designing a new video game, each new hypothesis (challenge) needs to be integrated into the narrative scenario while simultaneously building its progression. That is why I use the pronoun "I" instead of "we" or use another more impersonal (scientific) form of storytelling. I am, in fact, presenting authorial theory and hypotheses.
When you state that the conclusions are "somewhat unsupported by data", I acknowledge that I am indeed speculating a bit beyond the data, but with the intention of provoking those who have access to more information and/or other means of investigation to look at these areas that were suggested to me by the epidemiological data that I present. I do not understand why, during the 20th century, data originating from experiments on laboratory animals (all else being equal) were given more value than data obtained from observational population studies that reflect the reality of human population variation and historical experience. To me, this is completely arbitrary (and wrong).
I continue to work to present my work more clearly. But I judged that the hypothesis for the emergence of COVID was significant enough to be presented in a preprint even with the limitations that you identified.
Thank you very much again.
Competing interests
The author of this comment declares that they have no competing interests.