More from @mbalter

@mbalter — investigations and commentary

@mbalter

Sep 3

I don’t know how Covid-19 originated, and neither do any of the people currently publicly discussing the question. What we do know is that the pandemic began in Wuhan, where researchers at an institute in the city were collecting and doing research on SARS-like viruses…

@NIH

And we know that the institute in question (Wuhan Inst of Virology) has refused to tell @NIH what it did with the money funneled to it by @EcoHealthNYC, and that the WIV took a large database of viral sequences offline and now refuses to share it with anyone…

@EcoHealthNYC

We also know that the WIV, @EcoHealthNYC, and @Baric_Lab at U North Carolina wanted to genetically engineer SARS-like viruses to make them potentially more infectious to humans, and tried to get grant funds to do that research. We don’t know…

Read 10 tweets

@mbalter — investigations and commentary

@mbalter

Aug 31

Very glad to see this critique of #Fauci and his very flawed leadership during the pandemic. By uncritically turning him into an icon and a sacred cow, journalists and liberals actually took an “anti-science” stance themselves… nytimes.com/2022/08/30/opi…

Eg: “It was this‌‌ that became so destructive to trust: the idea that science is a force that demands things of the public yet relieves leaders of accountability.”

“The follow-the-science logic we have lived under during Covid demands wartime sacrifices from the public while rationalizing sloth from leaders and institutions in mobilizing tools to relieve the burden. It became an easy out for bureaucratic turf protection…”

Read 6 tweets

@mbalter — investigations and commentary

@mbalter

Aug 17

@guardian

I've held off saying too much about this interview in @guardian with virologist Angela Rasmussen by @lfspinney, because I have great overall respect for Laura as a science journalist and she has been a good friend for a number of years. theguardian.com/world/2022/aug…

But my conscious has been bothering me because the framing and content of this interview is really pretty outrageous. The subhead says that Rasmussen "who has been abused online for defending a ‘natural’ origin" of Covid-19, and in the interview she is allowed...

to talk about the toxic nature of Twitter and how she has been attacked personally: "I’ve had rape and death threats; I’ve had to call the police. I’ve got pretty high self-esteem, but it wears you down." Obviously any such attacks are reprehensible, but they are not...

Read 24 tweets

@mbalter — investigations and commentary

@mbalter

Aug 15

Chinese and American scientists wanted to genetically engineer a SARS-like virus with a feature that would make it more infectious to humans. That is documented. We don’t know if they did it or not; some will not answer the question, others are not necessarily credible…

Until we do know, discussions of Covid-19 origins are missing a critical piece of information that might support a lab-leak scenario. Likewise, we don’t know when the earliest Covid-19 cases were, so missing critical data that might (or might not) support natural origins.

The odd thing is that scientists and science journalists who support the natural origins scenario are very oddly lacking in curiosity about whether the genetic engineering was actually done. Very odd. We should all want to know all of these things, no matter what…

Read 4 tweets

@mbalter — investigations and commentary

@mbalter

May 23

In an enormous miscarriage of justice, a Peruvian judge has found against anthropologist Marcela Poirier in the defamation suit filed against her by twice confirmed sexual harasser Luis Jaime Castillo Butters. The penalty is a $48K fine and one year, eight months in jail.

The judge also suspended Marcela's lawyer, Brenda Alvarez, from practicing law on the grounds that she supposedly tried to delay the trial. Brenda will immediately appeal, of course. The judge dismissed the testimony of all of Marcela's witnesses, including me...

@PUCP

the reporter who initially investigated allegations of sexual #harassment against Castillo and found them to be well supported (as did the sexual harassment commission of Castillo's university, the @PUCP, and @theNASciences, which ejected him from its ranks.

Read 9 tweets