Not long after the appearance of an outbreak of viral disease, first scientists, and then newswriters, blame it all on mutation of the virus. It happened during the Ebolavirus outbreak in West Africa, and now it’s happening with Zika virus. The latest example is by parasitologist Peter Hotez, who writes in the New York Times: There …
I was asked to write a commentary for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to accompany an article entitled SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence. I’d like to explain why I wrote it and why I spent the last five paragraphs railing against regulating gain-of-function experiments. Towards the end of 2014 the US government announced …
Moving beyond metagenomics to find the next pandemic virus Read More »
On November 13th, five colleagues and I released an open letter to The Lancet and editor Richard Horton about the PACE trial, which the journal published in 2011. The study’s reported findings–that cognitive behavior therapy and graded exercise therapy are effective treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome–have had enormous influence on clinical guidelines for the illness. Last October, Virology …
By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Last week, a commentary in Nature about the debate over data-sharing in science made some excellent points. Unfortunately, the authors lumped hard-line opponents of research into chronic fatigue syndrome with …
Trial By Error, Continued: A Few Words About Harassment Read More »
On 17 December 2015, Ron Davis, Bruce Levin, David Tuller and I requested trial data from the PACE study of treatments for ME/CFS published in The Lancet in 2011. Below is the response to our request from the Records & Compliance Manager of Queen Mary University of London. The bolded portion of our request, noted in the …
By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The PACE authors have long demonstrated great facility in evading questions they don’t want to answer. They did this in their response to correspondence about the original 2011 Lancet paper. …
Trial By Error, Continued: More Nonsense from The Lancet Psychiatry Read More »
