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Feb 20 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Word comes today from WHO press office that the agency has had no indication from @Nature that it has even acknowledged the request for correction of this article, nearly a week later. I have never seen a situation quite like this before. nature.com/articles/d4158…
Failure to quickly respond to requests for corrections, positively or negatively, is a violation of British #journalism #ethics as spelled out here: londonfreelance.org/nujcode2006.ht…. It is also a violation of U.S. journalism ethics codes, relevant since Nature publishes...
in the U.S. as well: spj.org/ethicscode.asp
I have contacted the Nature press office for comment on this, no response yet. I suggest that other journalists do so as well. If @Nature stands by its reporting, it should say that; if it plans a correction/clarification, it is well past time to say that too.
Finally, a response today:

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More from @mbalter

@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Feb 23
Yesterday I cited newly uncovered evidence that China’s “Bat Woman,” Shi Zhengli, might have been fearful of arrest shortly after the pandemic started for a paper she published about her lab’s work. I suggested she would be limited in what she could say after that…
And so I continued a critique I had made earlier of two profiles of Shi, published in @sciam and @techreview. Thanks to the tens of thousands who have viewed the short thread. It led immediately to personal attacks on me by the reporter who did the profiles, but that’s…
Par for the course despite the spreading of one very specific lie about me. More interesting, it demonstrated a lack of sophistication on the part of some both about China and the nature of journalism. Some of that actually came from science journalists themselves…
Read 5 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Feb 23
1/ I've got a little sidebar on the Jones et al. study that detected one of the unreported/unpublished viral constructs that Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Inst Virology and her team were apparently working on. (For details and background see: alexwasburne.substack.com/p/an-unreporte…)
2/ We know from this evidence, as well as the many papers Shi Zhengli and her colleagues published (some with EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak) that Shi and her team were very adept at genetic engineering of SARS-like viruses. They passaged the viruses in...
3/ cell cultures, mice with humanized coronavirus receptors, and did lots of manipulations. But when @sciencecohen asked her in an interview if her team had inserted a furin cleavage site into SARS-like viruses, she denied it (a genetic segment that gives...
Read 7 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Feb 22
I’ve said it repeatedly and it’s still true: I don’t know how this pandemic started, and I see no DIRECT evidence for either of the two leading hypotheses. But what I do see is that the zoonotic transfer side has come up with no new data since July 2022, when…
It published the Worobey and Pekar papers in @ScienceMagazine. (At the time, even I, a lowly science journalist, could see the shortcomings of those papers, and soon afterwards a number of critiques were posted online.) And those two papers provide…
Only circumstantial evidence at best. Meanwhile, the lab origins side continues to come up, sometimes on a daily basis, with its own pile of circumstantial evidence, some of it based on genetic analysis and some based on FOIA documents showing that key players…
Read 6 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Feb 20
Finally, after nearly a full week, a response from Nature on its story about the WHO Covid origins investigation:
2/ From Richard Webb, Chief Magazine Editor:
 
“Nature’s journalists are in discussion with the World Health Organization regarding their concerns about our article. We are committed to upholding the highest standards in journalism and take accuracy very seriously.”
3/ Not much of a response after all these days, but at least a response.
Read 5 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Feb 5
1/ Why have mainstream journalists, and especially science writers, done such a bad (read: biased and woefully incomplete) job covering the Covid origins story? And why, in doing so, have they violated basic journalistic principles? I think the answer is relatively simple…
2/ In recent years journalists and journalism profs (including myself in both categories) have cautioned against an uncritical form of “objectivity,” which in practical terms often results in the kind of “both-sides-ism” that has been correctly criticized—ie, the idea…
3/ That you give equal time to both sides of a controversy no matter what direct the evidence points in. Here are three well-known and much discussed examples: a/ Election denialism, “stop the steal,” and other forms of insistence that Trump really won the 2020…
Read 21 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Feb 4
This email from Peter Daszak to participants in an upcoming joint meeting with Chinese scientists is worth a second look. The questions he poses suggest he has little knowledge of what Chinese counterparts are doing in areas that were supposed to be matters of...
Close collaboration over many years between EcoHealth Alliance and Chinese scientists and officials, including at the Wuhan Inst Virology. Yet by September 2020 it's almost as if the U.S. side does not have a clue, even about searches for intermediate hosts...
I have pointed out before that we don't seem to have any idea about what the Chinese were doing about searching for intermediate hosts beyond very initial studies, or whether they are doing anything now. Of course the official Chinese line is that the pandemic started...
Read 7 tweets

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