How I became a human plague – and stumbled into one of the most astonishing scientific stories I’ve ever encountered.
My column.
Plus thread. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
1. There’s an aspect of this story that I didn’t have space for in the column. This is about how the scientific and media establishment closed ranks around bad science, defending it from legitimate questioning and criticism.
2. In 2011, the Lancet’s editor, @richardhorton1, a man I otherwise admire, was challenged about major anomalies and irregularities in the PACE Trial paper he published. He dismissed the critics as “a small but highly vocal minority”. They turned out to be right.
3. In 2012, a promoter of the now-debunked claims that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Graded Exercise Therapy are effective treatments for ME/CFS was awarded the John Maddox Prize for defending them against what the Prize board called “intimidation and harassment”.
4. Intimidation and harassment are never acceptable. It’s true that some patients resorted to online insults and abuse, which was clearly wrong. But much of what was called “intimidation and harassment” was in fact legitimate critique of the methodology and requests for data.
5. Queen Mary University of London spent 5 years rebuffing requests for the PACE Trial data, characterising them as “vexatious”. In the media, these requests were described as “harassment”. Again.
6. But these data should have been in the public domain from the outset. When they were eventually released and re-analysed, they showed that the PACE Trial conclusions were unsafe and unsupported.
7. When patients and the scientists supporting them revealed massive methodological flaws and showed that the £5m PACE Trial had reached unsafe conclusions, it was an amazing victory for citizen science. But it was reported in the media as - you guessed it - further “harassment”.
8. Here’s something that shouldn’t need stating. Scientists should NEVER close ranks against empirical challenge and criticism. They shouldn’t deny requests for data, shouldn’t shore up disproven claims, shouldn’t circle the wagons against legitimate public challenge.
9. Some major soul-searching is in order. Why was it that massive methodological flaws in the PACE Trial weren’t picked up in peer review? Why weren’t they spotted by the steering committee and external adjudicators?
10. Why weren’t the trial data released from the outset? Why was it left to patients and independent researchers to expose the problems with a massive and expensive trial? Why did senior figures and boards continue to defend disproven claims?
11. A great injustice has been done to patients already suffering grievously from a terrible condition. On the basis of flawed findings, they’ve been told that their condition is largely psychological, and they’ve been pressed into useless and, arguably, dangerous treatments.
12. In some cases they’ve been denied benefits. Guess what? The PACE Trial was part-funded by the Department for Work and Pensions. They’ve been treated as scroungers and malingerers. In other words, the scientific mistakes were highly consequential.
13. I would like to see those who defended the bad science of the PACE Trial stepping up and accepting they made mistakes – it’s the least they owe the patients. There also seems to be a strong case for retracting the original PACE Trial papers.
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1. You might not have heard of it, but the system supposed to protect us in England and Wales from #floods is an absolute disgrace: a network of old boys' clubs completely unaccountable to the public. No wonder it fails so badly.
My column + thread. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
2. The Internal Drainage Boards model dates from the 13th Century, and remains feudal in character. They’re cabals of landowners, unaccountable to the public, beholden neither to government nor to local authorities, who tend to operate in their own interests.
3. All too often, that means speeding floodwater off their own land and down to the nearest town or city, where it inflicts far more damage. We need a whole catchment-based approach, in which strategic decisions are made in the public interest.
1. Whenever I write about new fermentation technologies, that could greatly reduce the environmental impacts of our diets as well as the exploitation of animals, I run into the same set of objections. In this thread, I’ll take them one by one.🧵
2. A. “I don’t want to eat food from factories”.
Well that’s unfortunate, because almost everything you eat has passed through at least one factory before it reaches you. Even your fruit and veg are likely to have been through a grading and packing plant. Cont/
3. The meat you eat has passed through a long series of factories: the mills producing the feed, the industrial buildings in which the vast majority of farmed animals are kept, slaughterhouses, packing plants and warehouses. Cont/
1. How and why did the racist riots happen, and what do they tell us about where we might be heading? This thread concerns one part of the answer, the formation of what the historian Arno Meyer called a “crisis stratum” of disillusioned young men. 🧵
2. He was writing about the rise of fascism 100 years ago, but there are some disturbing parallels. Of course, there are also some major differences: for example, we are not recovering from a devastating war. How has it happened without that catalyst?
3. Well, those who have manipulated and helped create this crisis stratum have played on a similar sense of atomisation and betrayal, caused by decades of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism simultaneously promises the world and snatches it away. penguin.co.uk/books/455534/t…
A shocking report about how big environmental NGOs have helped greenwash the most damaging of all food products - beef. They've collaborated with brutal conglomerates to spread disinformation. As I know to my cost, in taking on beef, you take on everyone. vox.com/future-perfect…
These organisations need to take a long hard look at themselves:
@WWF
@nature_org
@EnvDefenseFund
PS: Environmentalists, including @algore, really need to stop hand-waving about "soil carbon sequestration". Agricultural soils are not and never will be reliable long-term stores of additional carbon.
1. What we are seeing all over social media now is flat denial of the very existence of the far right. Far right agitators claim to be simple “patriots”, defending their country. Which is just what far right agitators have said for the past century.🧵
2. They also claim that 20th Century Nazism and fascism were not far right at all, but leftwing movements. On what grounds? That “Nazi” is a contraction of National Socialist. I wonder how many other Nazi claims they take at face value?
3. Actual fascists and Nazis claim that Keir Starmer’s government and the police are fascists and Nazis, for having the temerity to enforce the law. Oh, and those of us who criticise them from the left, we are apparently fascists and Nazis too.