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@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
@mbalter
Jun 1 • 8 tweets • 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
1/ Happy to see that a defamation suit brought by Peruvian archaeologist (and former culture minister) Luis Jame Castillo Butters against @theNASciences and its president @Marcia4Science has been dismissed by the federal judge in the case. See: pacermonitor.com/public/case/46…
2/ Castillo was kicked out of the NAS in October 2021 after an internal investigation confirmed longstanding allegations of sexual #harassment by Castillo. However, the NAS never said publicly this was the reason for his ejection, only telling NAS members that he had…
3/ violate the NAS Code of Conduct. Indeed, it was Castillo himself, not NAS, who made public the allegations of sexual harassment, when he filed his lawsuit against the academy. Thus the defendants’ argument that Castillo had, in legalese, “failed to state a claim” was…
4/ persuasive to the judge. However, she dismissed the case “without prejudice,” meaning that Castillo can refile the lawsuit if (and only if) he can come up with facts that would overcome the deficiencies of his first Complaint in the case. That is going to be even…
5/ more difficult now, because Castillo relied heavily upon a court judgment in Peru of defamation against a former student for alleging sexual harassment against Castillo, but that judgment has since been set aside by an appeals court. For background on all of this…
6/ See this blog post which includes links to my reporting on Castillo and the overwhelming evidence that he did indeed engage in sexual harassment and other misconduct:

michael-balter.blogspot.com/2022/10/peruvi…. #MeToo
Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, sorry.
7/ PS—Those archaeologists in Peru and the U.S. who cravenly took Castillo’s side against survivors of his abuses should think twice, three times about who they ally with. In the end sucking up to Castillo, despite his (fast waning) power in Peru, has done them little good.

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More from @mbalter

@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Jun 4
1/ One of the many flaws in #media coverage of the #COVID19 pandemic is the very narrow focus of the “experts” used as sources in the reporting. Virologists are usually considered the number one go-to scientists, with physicians and public health officials a close second…
2/ But actually, understanding a pandemic (or any public health issue for that matter) requires the input of many specialties, including epidemiologists, immunologists, cell and molecular biologists, microbiologists, geneticists, statisticians, and then…
3/ scholars in the social sciences, including sociologists, psychologists, historians of science, philosophers of science, and so forth. To circle back, many virologists have militantly tried to claim this subject matter as their domain and only their domain, but journalists…
Read 7 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Jun 3
1/ This followup story by @KatherineJWu in @TheAtlantic, updating her original piece on the raccoon dog story in the magazine, is much better, and seemingly much more balanced. But I say “seemingly” because in reality it has some serious shortcomings. theatlantic.com/science/archiv…
2/ Most importantly, while it argues that scientists interpret new data thru the lens of their preconceptions and biases—something that is undoubtedly true—it fails to evaluate whether the original claims that raccoon dogs had been linked to the Covid virus was…
3/ exaggerated, possibly even deliberately, by the raccoon dog team. Rather Wu goes from a very slanted perspective in her first piece to posing as a neutral referee in the debate in the second piece. It is understandable why Wu (and other reporters) would do this:
Read 11 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Jun 1
1/ In this @VanityFair piece by @KatherineEban, French researcher Florence Debarre is quoted as saying the headline in @KatherineJWu’s story in @TheAtlantic about the raccoon dog “findings” being the “strongest evidence yet” for a market origin of the pandemic was “ridiculous.”
2/ Yet the question remains how Wu and her editors got this idea, which a spokesperson for the magazine basically stood by both in a statement to Eban and an earlier statement to me for an article in Quill (the @spj_tweets magazine.) The answer may lie with another question…
3/ which is who tipped Wu off to the analysis of the “international team” in the first place. My hunch is that whoever did that tipped off reporters at @nytimes and @ScienceMagazine at close to the same time, because both publications were able to get stories up the same day.
Read 10 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
Jun 1
1/ The position of most proponents of a zoonotic spillover scenario for the origins of #COVID19 is that, despite the warnings given by the 2002-4 SARS1 outbreak, Chinese officials failed to control or even seriously regulate the wildlife trade, thereby causing the pandemic…
2/ The position of most proponents of a lab or research-related origin for the pandemic is that Chinese officials encouraged risky research with potential human pathogens, thereby causing the pandemic when they escaped into the larger human population. The irony is…
3/ That both sides are right, no matter what the actual origins of the pandemic turn out to be: Wildlife trade was not adequately controlled, and risky research was done. So anyone who thinks they are somehow protecting the reputation of Chinese scientists…
Read 4 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
May 31
1/ This piece by @emilyakopp about the raccoon dog saga and how reporters got it so wrong (thanks to scientists who also got it wrong. in some cases deliberately) is well worth you time. emilyakopp.substack.com/p/the-raccoon-…
2/ And it raises an important question that is still not resolved. Why did it take a year for the Liu et al. paper in @Nature to be published? The paper spent many months in peer review, and it was substantially revised between the time the preprint was posted in Feb 2022...
3/ and the paper published in April of this year (nature.com/articles/s4158….) There are two possible clues. One came in a story in @ScienceMagazine by reporter @sciencecohen last year in which Cohen cited an anonymous peer reviewer on the paper to the effect...
Read 14 tweets
@mbalter — investigations and commentary Profile picture
May 17
1/ In 2020, without actually intending to, military scientists destroyed the faulty logic behind the infamous Andersen et al. “Proximal Origins” letter in @NatureMedicine. Thanks to DRASTIC for making it publicly available. drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/an-arg…
2/ It’s not entirely surprising, because the Proximal Origins letter, as fully documented in emails obtained via FOIA, was essentially made to order by Fauci, Collins, and Farrar in a conscious attempt to squelch any speculations about a possible law origin. Farrar…
3/ Was actually involved in what he himself called “micro-editing” of the manuscript before it was submitted to @Nature (where it was rejected) and eventually published in @NatureMedicine. This probably explains why Andersen and the other Proximal Origins authors…
Read 6 tweets

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