Last year, we updated our Cochrane review on mammography screening with more mortality data and sent it to Cochrane in August 2023. The many comments we received on the very minor, fourth update of a well-known and highly cited Cochrane review that has been around for 23 years1 illustrates that Cochrane has become a highly […]

By Peter C Gøtzsche Institute for Scientific Freedom Copenhagen 6 November 2023 The day after I was expelled from the Cochrane Governing Board and from the Cochrane Collaboration on 13 September 2018, four board members resigned in protest. Two days later, they gave their reasons in an email, “Why we resigned,” which they sent to

Why did governments all over the world and their so-called experts lie profusely about the effect of face masks when they don’t seem to work? And why did Cochrane throw its researchers under the bus both in 2020 and in 2023, thereby undermining its own credibility? Read the bizarre story here.

All reputable medical journals have an impartial mechanism for dealing with allegations of editorial misconduct. In the past, this was also the case for the Cochrane Library. Today, Cochrane’s attitude can best be described as, “We don’t give a damn. We are beyond reproach.” Cochrane’s ongoing crisis caused by multiple missteps – most recently the

By Peter C Gøtzsche Cochrane – A sinking ship? This article was posted by PhD Maryanne Demasi as a blog on the website of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine on 16 September 2018 (https://blogs.bmj.com/bmjebmspotlight/2018/09/16/cochrane-a-sinking-ship/). Incidentally, I found out earlier this week that the link had become inactive: “This site has been archived or suspended.” Demasi inquired, and

Open letter to Karla Soares-Weiser Editor-in-Chief, the Cochrane Collaboration Complaint about Cochrane editors committing editorial misconduct Dear Karla, I hereby complain to you about what I consider editorial misconduct in the Cochrane Common Mental Disorders group. Briefly, while this group imposed ever increasing demands to our protocol about safe withdrawal of depression drugs in patients

I published this book on 8 January 2022. It can be downloaded for free. It is the story about institutional corruption and the rapid transformation of a prosperous democracy into a brutal tyranny. It explains why one of the most important organisations ever in healthcare, the Cochrane Collaboration, now seems to be doomed because the

Today, I (Peter Gøtzsche) discovered that an article I published in 2011 in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews about review production in Cochrane no longer existed. I have therefore uploaded it. It showed that Cochrane centres were essential for review production. However, Cochrane’s CEO from 2012 to 2021, journalist Mark Wilson, systematically undermined the