Scientist behind Trump's Tylenol claims was paid $150K to give evidence

https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/autism-scientist-tesitify-andrea-baccarelli-havard-aceraminophen-paracetamol-wvvzznhsf

by voxadam • 10 months ago

27 18 10 months ago

thetimes.com

leakycap3• 10 months ago

According to a court deposition in August 2023, Baccarelli said he had made “about $150,000” as an expert witness in the case.

In flyover states in the US, expert witnesses on cases I've seen are often $400 or more per hour, including correspondence, reading/material review, and meetings.

Courtroom days often cost thousands if not tens of thousands per day in appearance fees, plus travel, food, and a nice hotel.

The average costs when dealing with expert witnesses for New York federal court would be much higher than my low cost state.

$150k seems on the lower end for an expert on a matter that ended up at trial to me and probably indicates a few hundred hours of review, meetings, testimony, plus any trial day costs.

anigbrowl2• 10 months ago

I think this might be a cultural mismatch. Expert witnesses in the UK can be paid, but the sums involved are pocket money by American standards. Legal proceedings there also tend not to run as long, notwithstanding the Bleak House stereotypes.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/expert-witnesses-in-legal-aid-ca...

ggm• 10 months ago

Knew one, who got tired of his fee being swallowed by his employer and shifted to a smaller fee, and a very large in-kind: his choice of Michelin starred restaurant, his choice of wines. No questions to cost entertained. Everyone wound up happy I guess.

bigfatkitten• 10 months ago

That’s only the scale that Legal Aid pays. It doesn’t bind anyone else, including the CPS.

Experts are otherwise free to charge whatever fee they like on a commercial basis, though in civil matters, the more outrageous the fee, the smaller the chance that it would be recoverable from the other side if costs are awarded.

tzs• 10 months ago

I once worked at a company that got in a patent dispute with another company. As part of this I had to work with the patent lawyers and litigators, and also attend the trial.

After seeing at the trial that the expert witness testimony from both sides included some things that I could not imagine any engineer with their levels of expertise and experience saying--things that would completely destroy my credibility with colleagues if I had said them--I asked the lawyers what the heck was going on.

For example, if something specifies that some data is to be stored in a computer's "RAM cache", does it count if it is stored on a hard disk on that computer rather than the kind semiconductor memory that is connected to and addressed by the CPUs address bus?

I watched an expert witness who was a retired electrical engineer who was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and recipient of their Lifetime Achievement Award, had been the found of the computer science/computer engineering program at one of the top computer engineering schools in the US and was a professor emeritus from there, had numerous patents on some of the most important early work on modern computers and had published some of the most important early research papers in the field testify that it was common usage and commonly understood by almost all programmers and engineers that "RAM cache" included caches that were solely on hard disk because "RAM" means "Random Access Memory" and hard disks are both memory and random access.

They explained the expert witness gig to me, and it was eye opening.

Lawyers pay you a boatload of money to write a report that supports their case, then come to the trial (all expenses paid) where you spend an hour on the stand being examined and cross examined about the report and also trying to blow holes in the other side's expert report.

If you have to stretch the truth a bit (or a lot...) in your report to better help the case, it won't harm your reputation with colleagues because they all know about these expert witness jobs. So if they hear that Professor Emeritus Jones said something ridiculous as an expert witness they don't think, "Oh that's too bad...looks like he's getting senile". They think something like "Oh, that's right. I heard that he and his wife wanted to buy a $100k RV and take a road trip around the country this summer. I guess that's how he's paying for it".

I asked one of the experts on our side what he was using his expert witness money for. He was using it for a Tesla Roadster.

It should probably be noted that there are a couple of different kinds of experts. The kind I'm talking about I'll call a "general expert" because I don't actually know what if any term is used for them. They are experts in some field relevant to the case, and are there to explain that field to the court. They don't have to know much about the actual case. They just need to know what parts of their field the lawyers want them to educate the court and jury on and what the lawyers want the court and jury to believe about that field.

Their report is basically a big popular science article on the field that just concentrates on the parts the lawyers want emphasized. It is not really a lot of work to write it. They are making a totally ridiculous effective hourly rate for the gig.

There's another kind of expert that has to know a lot more about the case. For example if the case involves computer source code on both sides each side will have an expert who is given access to the other side's code and their job is to read it and understand it, and then produce a report explaining how that fits in with whatever legal theory their side is advancing. That can be a whole lot of work and so while they do make a good amount of money from this the hourly rate is much lower than that of those general experts.

Akasazh• 10 months ago

That's an amazing write up, and a very fucked state of affairs.

leakycap3• 10 months ago

Lawyers pay you a boatload of money to write a report that supports their case, then come to the trial (all expenses paid) where you spend an hour on the stand being examined and cross examined about the report and also trying to blow holes in the other side's expert report.

First, I have rarely seen an expert witness be given more than a few hours on the stand. Because, as jurors will be instructed by the judge, expert witness testimony is a special kind of evidence, allowed under specific rules, and they're rarely the bulk of any case's presentation in court.

On the other hand, they may have spend countless hours doing specialized analysis, which has to be documented and stand up to literal legal scrutiny for correctness/completeness. The other side will do their absolute best to destroy your expert witness, often bringing up their hourly rate and prior cases they worked on.

But - if their work was bunk, the opposing side would have the expert witness thrown off the witness list and their report excluded. This is court we're talking about.

You've written an engaging post that seems mostly caught up in the hourly rate of someone else fitting a worldview where, based on an industry and hourly rate, you decide whether they earned it.

Law firms employ smart people who would not pay hundreds of dollar for an outside expert who can't produce verifiable or at least defendable positions based in reality and experience.

"RAM cache" included caches that were solely on hard disk because "RAM" means "Random Access Memory" and hard disks are both memory and random access.

Having used Connectix RamDoubler for many years, I would have verified the meaning if it was crucial for the operation of whatever I was paying someone to write for me. Cache is one of the more esoteric and nuanced areas in computing where hardware and software interact and any specifications related to cache should have been clearly defined.

It is not really a lot of work to write it.

I love when people who haven't done something think they know how much work goes into it.

rolph• 10 months ago

"In general, Dr Baccarelli downplays those studies that undercut his causation thesis and emphasises those that align with his thesis.”

exactly opposite the way it should be done. generally we attempt to invalidate a hypothesis, experience an antithesis, and form a synthesis from these proceedings as per Hegel.

JohnFen• 10 months ago

True, but only if your goal is to seek truth.

baobun• 10 months ago

OotL: What's the angle on this acetaminophen/paraceamol/Tylenol drama in the media? It being one among many factors in autism does not discount other explanations so I can't see a "they're burying it" angle. We already know by now that acetaminophen is a dangerous shit drug that should be avoided by most and usually have other better options in the first place. The usual suspects for manufacturing opinions through these kinds of media plays (like J&J are prone to) would rather like to downplay it I presume.

Is there a lede?

resoluteteeth• 10 months ago

I don't think there's any specific reason for people to want the reason to be tylenol specifically, but RFK had announced that he was going to solve autism by September and it seems like he really just wanted to come up with an explanation for autism that blames it on some sort of medicine that people can simply choose not to use. Tylenol is something that people have considered as a possible cause of autism, although the best/biggest study seems to have pretty clearly proven that use of tylenol doesn't actually cause autism, so it's a fairly obvious thing to pull out if you just want to come up with some medicine to blame for autism.

Perhaps the better question is why he isn't blaming vaccines, which is what many people expected him to do, but maybe there was too much pushback from the rest of the administration on that.

jfengel• 10 months ago

He promised us "the" cause of autism. What we've gotten, even in the purchased expert testimony, is a minor contribution to autism at best.

So are we still waiting for the big news about what really causes autism? Everybody assumed he was gonna say "vaccines". He's got another week to go. Is this all we're going to get, or is there more?

jazzyjackson• 10 months ago

Take focus away from the previous outrage from the day before. It was cancelling Jimmy Kimmel, then $100k HB1 visas, before that I already forget, what was it he did the day the Birthday Book dropped?

It doesn't matter if these declarations are suspended or don't go anywhere, as long as it overwhelms the news cycle for the day.

wk_end• 10 months ago

For reference, this is a strategy called "Flooding the Zone". It's commonly associated with Steve Bannon, one of Trump's early ideological backers.

https://justice-everywhere.org/general/flooding-the-zone-and...

throw0101c• 10 months ago

It doesn't matter if these declarations are suspended or don't go anywhere, as long as it overwhelms the news cycle for the day.

And distracts from the Epstein files not being fully released as promised.

cranberryturkey• 10 months ago

I heard on CNN that its only dangerous if you're pregnant and take Tylenol for more than a month every day. Anything under 7 days is perfectly fine.

Scientist behind Trump's Tylenol claims was paid $150K to give evidence

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