Peter C Gøtzsche writes: In March, the world’s most cited medical researcher, Professor John Ioannidis from Stanford University, became the subject of one of the worst witch hunts in newer medical history after he had published an opinion article about the COVID-19 pandemic. Journalists Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee described this in an opinion piece with a sidebar in Scientific American, only to be exposed to serious editorial misconduct by the journal.

The journal violated the first rule of journalistic integrity by publishing accusations without inquiring of the accused. The editors uploaded “corrections” on the journal’s homepage, several of which were errors committed by themselves; others were not true or irrelevant. Lenzer and Brownlee tried to correct the false “corrections” but the editors also denied them this opportunity. The inappropriate “corrections” triggered an outpouring of hate mail and false claims about Ioannidis and the integrity of Lenzer and Brownlee as journalists.

It was so bad that Jeffrey S. Flier, former Dean at Harvard Medical School, wrote to the editors asking them to take proper action. Scientific American has not published his letter.

It is essential to expose misconduct. Flier’s letter and Lenzer and Brownlee’s corrections of the erroneous “corrections” made by the editors can be found on Lenzer’s website.

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Maryanne Demasi reflects on the reports published this week about two corona vaccines. The new vaccines have offered some hope that, sometime down the road, our lives can return to normal. Read more

When the state knows best and violates human rights, we are on a dangerous course. History has shown that leaders who assure us that the situation is so serious that we must give up our freedom to gain security against an external or internal danger usually end up giving us neither freedom nor security but themselves the absolute power. Read more

The Danish National Board of Health’s documentation for the effect of face masks is highly questionable and the governments decision to kill all 15 million minks in Denmark was neither legal nor reasonable. Read more

Now we can no longer survive without looking like bank robbers when it comes to shopping. In a few years, we have gone from mask ban to mask in order to reduce the risk of becoming infected with coronavirus, but it probably does not work. Read article

Abhishek Anand, PhD in computer science from Cornell University, Ithaca, had made a donation to the Institute and allowed me to tell why he did that.

Many people donate their hard-earned money to charities with noble sounding names line the “Lupus Foundation” thinking that the money helps people with such diseases. Most of such organizations, however, are heavily controlled by pharma and are more about the interests (profits) of those drug companies than about reducing human suffering. Pouring money into such organizations may actually be hurting humanity. There is a serious rot at the foundations of “health and medical science”. There isn’t much hope until we fix that. There is one organization whose members have a history of fighting against this corruption even at the cost of deep personal sacrifices. They have been successful many times in exposing pharma’s scientific fraud and in improving the laws around transparency and thereby make the evidence used to approve drugs available. If somebody wishes to use their money towards improving the health of humanity, this is the organization they should donate to: www.scientificfreedom.dk.

The nation’s flawed dietary guidelines have much to answer for, with more than 5000 people losing their lives “unnecessarily” from Type 2 diabetes in the past three months. With evidence showing diet can improve underlying health conditions, in a time of rising COVID-19 infections it is more important than ever to revise the dietary guidelines, writes Dr Maryanne Demasi. See the article here.

Rushing a coronavirus vaccine As we’ve seen in Australia already, compliance with childhood immunisation schedules has been linked to pre-school admission (No jab, no play) and to family assistance payments (No jab, no pay) … some are warning that linking vaccination to access to services will only invigorate the anti-vaccination movement …

It has become increasingly difficult to publish articles in medical journals that are critical of drugs or the drug industry, or that expose fraud and other wrongdoing committed by doctors. It is also difficult to publish articles documenting that the status quo in a medical specialty is harmful for the patients even though such articles should be warmly welcomed. Read my article about this.

On 22 May 2020, preliminary data from a placebo-controlled randomised trial of remdesivir in 1063 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 with lower respiratory tract involvement was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). There was a lot of enthusiasm and governments in many countries immediately declared that they would make remdesivir available. I shall discuss here what the trial report showed and didn’t show or didn’t tell the readers about, and how it was inappropriately hyped by two co-authors on the trial report, Jens Lundgren and Thomas Benfield, professors of infectious diseases in Denmark who have constantly been in the TV news offering their guidance to the Danish population during the coronavirus epidemic. Read the article