18 MARCH 2019
By David Tuller, DrPH
This morning I sent the following e-mail to Kate Kelland, the Reuters reporter who wrote last week’s story about horrible patients and horrible me, and about how all this horribleness is affecting Professor Michael Sharpe. I cc’d Professor Racaniello and the two Reuters editors listed on the story.
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Hi, Kate–
Congratulations on last week’s piece. It was late August when we met in New York, so I was wondering when it would appear. While I will be responding at greater length in the near future, I wanted to raise two issues of immediate concern.
First, you wrote this: “Tuller has also posted a 15,000 word review of it [PACE] via the website of a Berkeley colleague.” That statement is false.
In the course of your reporting last fall, you exchanged e-mails with Professor Vincent Racaniello. You contacted him because he is the host of the science site Virology Blog, which published my 15,000-word “review” of PACE. Virology Blog also published the 140+ posts mentioned in your story as well as various open letters to The Lancet and elsewhere about the egregious flaws of PACE and related research. Professor Racaniello is a prominent microbiologist at Columbia University. He is not affiliated with Berkeley. I have cc’d him here in case you need him to confirm that he cannot accurately be described as “a Berkeley colleague” of mine.
