Peter Gøtzsche - Indian Journal of Medical Ethics article

[Rosewind]

If people are interested there’s a very very cross piece in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics from Peter Gøtzsche where he clearly was less than pleased by a piece from Trish Greenhalgh:

https://ijme.in/wp-content/uploads/2019 ... RATION.pdf

Original piece:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... /jep.13124

I would refer to the Gøtzsche piece as a hissy fit...his references are pretty amusing!

[mikeh]

If people are interested there’s a very very cross piece in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics from Peter Gøtzsche where he clearly was less than pleased by a piece from Trish Greenhalgh:

https://ijme.in/wp-content/uploads/2019 ... RATION.pdf

Original piece:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... /jep.13124

I would refer to the Gøtzsche piece as a hissy fit...his references are pretty amusing!

Worth a reminder to previous viewers, and to inform new viewers, Peter Gotzsche is a former public health champion who has had some kind of meltdown, slagging off the HPV vaccine is various odd ways. Having spent some time integrating himself within the antivax community, he is now getting upset with comparisons to Andrew Wakefield.

You can have a gander at this article if you like, which covers elements of the saga - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-017-0004-x

Also to note - the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics is known for propogating antivax literature. One of the journals of choice if you're a quack or otherwise-scientific-scoundrel.

[Chris Preston]

Umm Yes. Gøtzsche had a serious falling out with the Cochrane Collaboration and is trying to get back at them. It would have helped him a lot if he hadn't gone all total crank over the HPV vaccine. There are many large studies showing almost no serious side-effects* of the HPV vaccine, yet Gøtzsche wants to invent some.



*No, a sore shoulder does not count as a serious side effect.

[El Pollo Diablo]

Is there a good overall timeline or storytelling of how Goetzsche has gone off the rails?

[Stephanie]

Is there a good overall timeline or storytelling of how Goetzsche has gone off the rails?

I think this blog from Hilda Bastian is a reasonable summary of some parts https://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe ... o-science/

[mikeh]

Is there a good overall timeline or storytelling of how Goetzsche has gone off the rails?

I think this blog from Hilda Bastian is a reasonable summary of some parts https://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe ... o-science/

There's also our, as yet unpublished, response to Gotzsche and friends' own response to our NPJ article.

I think the time has somewhat passed for the journal to publish their and our pieces. I'm rather thinking that (with regards, in particular, their correspondence) the journal got worried about fall-out. To put it politely here, they did have to revise their response quite significantly from version one, let's put it that way. And in the end, prob decided it wasn't worth it. Which is fair enough.

Will have to chew that fat on whether our scribblings can see the light of day (in my view, not a problem, though I'd need to go back and read v1 and v2 to see if the sands of time have now rendered that irrelevant, as Gotzsche does rather sail onto new rantings on a regular basis).

[Rosewind]

Another source of info re Gøtzsche is the twitter account @Rosewind2007

It got lots of nonsense about kittens and bath ducks too, but search for Gøtzsche and there are, ahem, a couple of threads.

Looking through Gøtzsche’s references I am struck that of the 34:
12/34 feature the name Gøtzsche
3 of these 12 references are Gotzcshe’s books
5 of these 12 are comments/‘reports’/letters on his personal blog website Deadly Medicine
The remaining 4 are all pieces published in the BMJ

One thing I didn’t originally notice is that ref 29 is to an as yet unpublished book: “Vaccines: Truth, Lies and Controversy” by Peter Gøtzsche

[jimbob]

Another source of info re Gøtzsche is the twitter account @Rosewind2007

It got lots of nonsense about kittens and bath ducks too, but search for Gøtzsche and there are, ahem, a couple of threads.

Looking through Gøtzsche’s references I am struck that of the 34:
12/34 feature the name Gøtzsche
3 of these 12 references are Gotzcshe’s books
5 of these 12 are comments/‘reports’/letters on his personal blog website Deadly Medicine
The remaining 4 are all pieces published in the BMJ

One thing I didn’t originally notice is that ref 29 is to an as yet unpublished book: “Vaccines: Truth, Lies and Controversy” by Peter Gøtzsche

I've just followed you - although I'm a complete layperson when it comes to medicine. I've only been involved in one spat with antivaxers so far.

I managed to keep myself polite.

[Rosewind]

Anti-vaxxers LOVE Rosewind on Twitter...

[Bird on a Fire]

Mod note: one post removed from this thread at the poster's request, pending a re-write.

[Allo V Psycho]

I found the article by Peter Gøtzsche reasonably convincing, in the sense that, on the basis of that article alone, I felt reasonably convinced of the opposite of what he was arguing. This was largely due to the style and tone, in which numerous allegations were made (and often sourced to work by the author himself) in strident and partisan tones. By contrast, I found the Greenhalgh et al article thoughtful in tone, and well balanced, containing much food for reflection.

This is before I remembered having previously read about the scientific nature dispute (perhaps it was featured in the fast disappearing Continent of Atlantis, or Bad Science Forum, as it was sometimes known*), and coming to the conclusion that Gøtzsche was an unreliable analyst.


*Spoiler:

“By such reflections and by the continuance in them of a divine nature, the qualities which we have described grew and increased among them; but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see, grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts;

[mikeh]

Gotzsche is very much an unreliable analyst, acting in extremely bad faith, shouting at those who disagree with him and making threats of libel to several of these people. In the last year or so, a small snippet of his other wrongdoings include

- been sacked from his position on the Cochrane Collaboration Governing Board
- sacked from both his position as Director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre (though he inappropriately continues to use that affiliation) and his post at Rigshospitalet (a Copenhagen hospital, where the Nordic Cochrane Centre was based)
- presented in April 2018 at the anti-vaccination conference International Federation for Injured Children and Adults,
- contributed to the anti-vaccination film ‘Manufactured Crisis — HPV, Hype and Horror’.
- wrote that a review highlighting the excellent safety profile of the HPV vaccine had ‘missed nearly half of the eligible trials’ and this showed ‘important evidence of bias’, whereas in fact this is nonsense of Ress-Mogg standards.
- has previously made false accusations against Professor Julie Williams with regards conflicts of interest (in relation to the European Medicines Agency and the HPV vaccine). Turns out he'd googled the wrong Julie Williams.

And that's just tip of the iceberg.