Would be great! But the IVM aspect is not really mentioned in the lawsuit. I doubt they'll go down that route. What will be interesting to know is what this means for PLS's future, as Latona is still active as far as we can tell, and the SAFE grants it a huge chunk in PLS should PLS try to raise any money.
Thats so interesting. Ive wonder out loud before (here on this substack) what the hell was up with TOGETHERs media machine. How do you manage, as a scientific investigation, to gather such a media storm? How do you make it to my google news feed every week? It was as if their grant included a budget for a ten person PR and social media management team; rather unusual for a scientific project id say.
Now seeing this; that it was infact majority funded with the explicit aim to to score PR brownie points... things make a little more sense. Also it creates a rather strong motive to steer the conclusions id say. If this is a vehicle to keep CNN / NYT pushing regular articles about how great TOGETHER was (and by extension the FTX foundation and SBF), itd be a little awkward to reward them by slapping them in the face and contradicting them on the horse dewormer narrative they had settled on.
Yes. Might be wrong but I think TOGETHER's PR machine was well oiled before they even crossed path with SBF... and might be part of one factor for how the two met.
Why SBF settled on TOGETHER for his pharma ambitions we can't fully tell from the docs. Did he consider any others? It doesn't seem like it, but maybe. As mentioned in the article, all the other life sciences investments Latona made were introduced by Mills (with exception of Greenlight it seems). Odd that they didn't come across any others?
Also noteworthy is that SBF wrote up the vision for Latona in January, the same month he supposedly met Mills, and invested in PLS. It does make you wonder whether he had already decided to invest in TOGETHER, for whatever reason, and then dreamt up Latona as a vehicle to do it. There's no evidence of this to be clear, and it might not even be important, but it's a possibility.
Yeah my memory also does not serve well enough to say when the media offensive really took off... it makes sense for Latona to jump on and turbocharge an already well greased PR train.
It was just so remarkable to me; all newspapers running articles about this one study that has barely even started yet, and how its the best study ever and going to give us all the definite answers. Meanwhile it was never really an RCT (not that im in the camp that this is the only form of admissible evidence but whatever) and from the outside of the design it never looked as if this was the one study that was going to trump all other thousands of studies; neither in quality or quantity.
Obviously the explanation that 'science journalists' worldwide actually read the study design and all came to the same conclusion it was a great study is absurd on its face; thatd require there to be such a thing as 'science journalism'. The 'organic' explanation is they got lucky charming one high profile reporter, and all other newspapers just copy pasted what they read in the NYT, which is at least a plausible explanation. But id bet good money that this was not organic, and a good amount of money was spent to get this narrative train rolling so well.
Well as I recall it TOGETHER was already receiving a staggering amount of glowing press coverage well before the IVM or any other results got 'published' (or what had to pass for publication anyway). Of course the IVM signals that did come out of TOGETHER also got a warm welcome in the press but that only happened later.
Thanks for this very interesting research!
Any chance that the lawsuit with force disclosure of the data?
Would be great! But the IVM aspect is not really mentioned in the lawsuit. I doubt they'll go down that route. What will be interesting to know is what this means for PLS's future, as Latona is still active as far as we can tell, and the SAFE grants it a huge chunk in PLS should PLS try to raise any money.
Thats so interesting. Ive wonder out loud before (here on this substack) what the hell was up with TOGETHERs media machine. How do you manage, as a scientific investigation, to gather such a media storm? How do you make it to my google news feed every week? It was as if their grant included a budget for a ten person PR and social media management team; rather unusual for a scientific project id say.
Now seeing this; that it was infact majority funded with the explicit aim to to score PR brownie points... things make a little more sense. Also it creates a rather strong motive to steer the conclusions id say. If this is a vehicle to keep CNN / NYT pushing regular articles about how great TOGETHER was (and by extension the FTX foundation and SBF), itd be a little awkward to reward them by slapping them in the face and contradicting them on the horse dewormer narrative they had settled on.
Yes. Might be wrong but I think TOGETHER's PR machine was well oiled before they even crossed path with SBF... and might be part of one factor for how the two met.
Why SBF settled on TOGETHER for his pharma ambitions we can't fully tell from the docs. Did he consider any others? It doesn't seem like it, but maybe. As mentioned in the article, all the other life sciences investments Latona made were introduced by Mills (with exception of Greenlight it seems). Odd that they didn't come across any others?
Also noteworthy is that SBF wrote up the vision for Latona in January, the same month he supposedly met Mills, and invested in PLS. It does make you wonder whether he had already decided to invest in TOGETHER, for whatever reason, and then dreamt up Latona as a vehicle to do it. There's no evidence of this to be clear, and it might not even be important, but it's a possibility.
Yeah my memory also does not serve well enough to say when the media offensive really took off... it makes sense for Latona to jump on and turbocharge an already well greased PR train.
It was just so remarkable to me; all newspapers running articles about this one study that has barely even started yet, and how its the best study ever and going to give us all the definite answers. Meanwhile it was never really an RCT (not that im in the camp that this is the only form of admissible evidence but whatever) and from the outside of the design it never looked as if this was the one study that was going to trump all other thousands of studies; neither in quality or quantity.
Obviously the explanation that 'science journalists' worldwide actually read the study design and all came to the same conclusion it was a great study is absurd on its face; thatd require there to be such a thing as 'science journalism'. The 'organic' explanation is they got lucky charming one high profile reporter, and all other newspapers just copy pasted what they read in the NYT, which is at least a plausible explanation. But id bet good money that this was not organic, and a good amount of money was spent to get this narrative train rolling so well.
It fit the narrative, so everyone jumped on it I suppose. Finally a chance to placate the horse dewormers!
Well as I recall it TOGETHER was already receiving a staggering amount of glowing press coverage well before the IVM or any other results got 'published' (or what had to pass for publication anyway). Of course the IVM signals that did come out of TOGETHER also got a warm welcome in the press but that only happened later.