Editorial standards

1. Real events, primary records

News stories cover events that happened and can be checked: FDA warning letters and announcements, Federal Register notices, DOJ press releases, court filings and sentencing records, and named reputable press. Every story lists its sources, and primary records are flagged. When we can't open a record ourselves, for example a paywalled or blocked page, we say which outlet reported it.

2. Two dates, always

Every story shows two dates. The event date is when the thing we report happened; it also forms the URL. The published date is when Amino Wire published the story. Substantive changes add an updated date and an entry in the story's update log.

Published dates are always the real date the story went live on this site, never the date of the event. Stories in our archive report events from before our news desk opened. They show their published date (the day they first went live here) and, separately, the original event date taken from the story's primary sources. Only stories about current events appear in our Google News sitemap.

3. Conflicting sources

When credible sources disagree, as with vote tallies, we show both versions and name who said what, or we leave the figure out. We don't pick the more dramatic number.

4. No rankings, ever

Because our owner sells peptides (ownership disclosure), we do not rank, score, rate, grade or recommend vendors or products. Status logs are alphabetical. Record-type labels describe the kind of record, not a judgment.

5. Status log rules

• Entries are dated public records or our own logged HTTP checks, with timestamps in UTC.
• We record what loaded. A Cloudflare challenge or block is "not evidence either way."
• We do not place orders or contact businesses through their storefronts.
• We omit the personal names of private individuals who appear on letters, unless they are central to a court case already reported by public authorities.
• Unconfirmed claims made by other sites are labeled unconfirmed, or left out.

6. Health and legal content

We explain law and laboratory methods. We do not give dosing, protocols or medical advice, and we describe products sold as "research use only" accordingly. Explainers cite the statute, regulation or agency document.

7. Bylines and review

Work is published under the Amino Wire Editorial Team byline and reviewed by the same team. Review is a separate checking pass, done before publication and again whenever a page is updated:

• Every factual claim is matched to the source listed on the page, and primary records are opened where they're reachable.
• Dates, docket numbers, quoted figures and names of agencies are checked against the record.
• The page is checked against the no-ranking rule and our health and legal content limits (section 6).
• The "Last reviewed" date in the byline is the date of the most recent completed check.

The team is an editorial desk. It is not a licensed physician, pharmacist, chemist or attorney, and nothing on the site is medical or legal advice. We don't name individual reviewers or claim credentials we can't show. The full process is on our methodology page.

8. Tools

We may use software, including AI tools, to help draft, check links and format pages. Every fact is checked against its source before publication, and the editorial team is responsible for what's published.

9. How a news story gets published

We look for news every day, but we only publish when something new and checkable has happened. Most days that means one or two stories; some days it means none.

• Finding stories. Software watches FDA and Federal Register notices, court dockets, ClinicalTrials.gov, PubMed and news search. It also watches social media, but a post is only a tip. It is never the source for a fact.
• Deciding what is news. Each lead is scored on whether there's a primary record, whether other outlets confirm it, how recent it is, and whether we've already covered it. Leads we've already covered become updates to the existing story, not new articles.
• Writing. Stories are written from the primary record, with our own analysis: what happened, why it matters, what isn't known yet and what to watch. We don't rewrite other outlets' articles.
• Automated checks before publication. A story is blocked if:
  • it has fewer than two sources, or no primary record
  • a source doesn't load
  • a figure doesn't appear in a cited source
  • a quotation isn't found word for word in a cited source
  • it gives dosing amounts or makes medical claims
  • it closely matches one of our past stories, or copies wording from a source
• Dates. The published time shown and in our structured data is the real time the story went live, in US Eastern time. The event date is shown separately. Our news sitemap lists only stories we published in the last two days about events from the last three weeks.

10. Corrections

See our corrections policy.