Nature magazine tells on itself

Remember when that Nature reporter pretended in July she wanted to write a fair-minded piece about Unreported Truths and asked me a bunch of questions I answered at length? Yeah, about that...

The legacy media never changes.

It never gets more honest, it never stops running the same tired wannabe gotcha playbook, it never learns from its mistakes.

Luckily, I have.

In July, a writer for Nature magazine named Hannah Docter-Loeb contacted me with questions about Unreported Truths for an article. You vaguely might recall Hannah’s approach. I wrote about it, explaining I didn’t trust the magazine or its motives, but even so “I decided to answer. To steal the old line about second marriages, it’s the triumph of hope over experience.”

Experience won, though. It usually does.

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(Help me getting to the truth - no matter how hard the legacy media tries to stop me.)

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This morning, long after I’d forgotten this exchange, I woke up to the inevitable “gotcha” email from Hannah’s boss, Jack Leeming.

Three months later, Leeming was ready to tell me what the article was really about:

[H]ow Substack has become a popular place for those involved in the anti-vaccine movement and other areas generally considered to be outside of the scientific consensus. You’re mentioned as one of the writers within that movement…

The general thrust of the piece is that Substack has become immensely popular in this area because it lacks content moderation and allows relatively easy monetisation…

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You can read the rest of his pathetic attempt to bring down the hammer, and my response, in full below.

I am not surprised, nor am I concerned. My first email holds up very well. But I am annoyed. When Hannah emailed, I spent hours carefully and honestly answering her questions, as if what I said might matter. Several of you suggested at the time of the first post that I was wasting my time.

You were right. As I pointed out to Leeming, he didn’t even mention any of my answers, much less ask follow-up questions about them. He just made a bunch of allegations, including one that frames my ban from and return to Twitter in a way that defames me and recklessly disregards the truth.

The good news is that, if Nature does defame me, its complete disregard for my initial answers will be strong evidence of its malicious intent. And — as James Lawrence points out — Nature is based in Britain, where defamation is far easier to prove.

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(Jack Leeming’s email to me — unedited, and with only a salutation and deadline cropped, so it will fit in a screenshot. I apologize for the small type. You can read the full email at the footnote below.¹)

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(And my response, full and unedited, but unfortunately in even smaller type. Again, the full email is at the footnote below.²)

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The fact that Hannah Docter-Loeb isn’t the one asking these questions is interesting, though. I can only hope she is telling her boss she wants nothing to do with this trash.

Guess we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to enjoy having my worst expectations confirmed. There must be a German word for that feeling. Anyone know it?

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(Nature doesn’t always tell the truth. I do. With your support.)

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My original back-and-forth with Hannah Docter-Loeb, if you missed it:

1. Leeming’s email:

I’m an editor for Nature magazine, working on a story about how Substack has become a popular place for those involved in the anti-vaccine movement and other areas generally considered to be outside of the scientific consensus. You’re mentioned as one of the writers within that movement.

You of course already corresponded with Hannah earlier this year about the same piece.

The general thrust of the piece is that Substack has become immensely popular in this area because it lacks content moderation and allows relatively easy monetisation (as well as of course providing a robust newsletter platform). Could you speak to that?

More specifically those we spoke to allege:

• Substack writers including yourself endanger public health through the promotion of anti-vaccine information that isn’t rooted in accepted, peer-reviewed science.

• You and other Substackers are profiting from disseminating this information through Substack’s monetisation mechanisms.

• In general, anti-vaccine stances are supported by a small body of evidence compared to the larger weight of evidence for vaccination.

We also describe you as among the most popular (and thus best-paid) producers of this content on Substack.

Finally, we repeat some allegations or news published elsewhere:

• During the COVID-19 pandemic, you were consistently accused of spreading misinformation about vaccines and the virus

• In August 2021, you were banned from X, then Twitter, because of Covid vaccine claims. (You have since rejoined the app.)

2. My response to Leeming:

Jack -

This is classic. Your reporter sent me a long list of questions months ago pretending to be fair-minded. I answered them in detail (and published both sides of the conversation on my Substack). Now you pop up, not with any specific questions about my answers, but with the usual smears. Was she, perhaps, too embarrassed to play this game?

“Outside of the scientific consensus?” I interviewed the director of the National Institutes of Health for my Stack.

The Atlantic piece was published more than four years ago. It was wrong then, and time has not been kind to it. Why don’t you examine its specific claims - including my specific recommendations for mRNA use at that time - against what most of the mRNA countries say today?

Finally, and most importantly, the way you framed my ban from Twitter is not merely wrong but false and defamatory. You say I have “since rejoined the app” as if I somehow magically got back on, or as if I was able to rejoin after Elon Musk relaxed then-Twitter’s rules and policies. Neither is true. I sued Twitter for violating its own policies in banning me, and in April 2022 a federal judge in California, after examining the evidence, said I had a viable case. Twitter then settled with me, restored my account, and admitted it should not have banned me and my tweets had not violated its policies. My restoration occurred in July 2022, before Elon had bought Twitter, and documents I received later showed that Twitter’s most senior executives believed I should never have been banned at all and that the White House and a Pfizer board member had pressed the company to do so.

If you write about my ban from Twitter and do not explain this, you are defaming me. James Lawrence, my (excellent) lawyer in the case, is cc’d.

Thank you for confirming what I expected, that you planned a hatchet job all along and nothing I wrote in response to your questions would matter. It’s nice to know the legacy media never changes.

All best

Alex