A response to Susie H

A gradual accumulation of realisation

Our reader Susie H took me to task, writing:

“You didn’t really address the part of Vivien’s question where she asked how long you have been aware of the corruption, can you tell us? For me, the BMJ became suspect after the Brian Deer hit piece on Wakefield and then very much more so when Malhotra got such stick over statins. There are some good guy editors too, but they don’t have enough clout.”

The simple answer is because it was not a eureka moment when I sat up and exclaimed Crikey, most of them are crooks!

It was a slow accumulation of understanding based on experience and training. It probably started in the late 90s when my co-authors and I published a suite of reviews on influenza vaccines (and continued to update them until 2018). We found it strange that the evidence clearly showed little or no effect and governments, always looking for savings (according to them) did not stop sponsoring them. This was accompanied by initial stonewalling of the reviews. When governments, resear…