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My only insight into the people involved is that I know of some of them and there are far too many of them. A serious project would not have more than three professors at most. You never get any sort of sensible science with more people than that trying to make decisions on design. This looks...

Sounds sensible from the extracts. Good to see something as measured as this in New Scientist. Not sure where Strain gets this from: For example, graded exercise therapy helps those with pneumonia-like impacts, but can be harmful for those with the CFS/ME-like condition, says Strain. What...

This looks pretty empty of content or value to me. Even the headline explainer does not make sense: A major new £2.2m government-funded research project to improve the treatment, causes and symptoms of Long COVID in non-hospitalised patients. We don't need to improve the causes of Long Covid...

You shouldn't desist, but I doubt you will anyway!

Indeed. The problem with GRADE is that the pseudo arithmetic is applied strictly by organisations like NICE and Cochrane. NICE got the right result but it was more or less by chance that GRADE had adoption to get there.

I agree with the analysis the mechanics but my understanding is that the quest is for a definition of a specific source of bias relating to treatment delivery. Lack of blinding causes problems specifically with subjective outcomes but is classified under lack of blinding nonetheless.

If a tool is just a list of things to remember that is fine. The problem with tools like GRADE is that they attempt to extract general rules about the impact of bias on reliability using a bogus arithmetic.

Designed-in bias?

What about treatment-inherent cognitive bias? All sorts of treatments might induce cognitive bias through more general means but it seems that what is wanted is a category for bias where its induction is inherent in specific forms of treatment?

Yes, well crafted.

I would be pretty sceptical about claims about reactivation of EBV based on antibody tests. This is an issue that has been knocking around for decades and I think the conclusion has been that individual early antigen or IgM test results tell us little. I think to be convincing we would need to...

I don't think that is realistic. People die from Covid regularly, and often from hypoxia. Hypoxia will lead to brain ischaemia with an inflammatory reaction. The finding seem to me too banal to even bother with. Researchers seem to have completely lost their bearings in terms of basic...

This looks like meaningless hype to me. Why don't they give us some meaningful background to the cases? Since when were single nucleus transcriptomes useful in this sort of situation and so on. This looks like a group of people with very expensive equipment who have no idea what the results of...

This really is a weird and ignorant statement from Fiona. My understanding of pacing is that you work within your capacity. If you discover, as I did after EBV at a point in time, that your capacity seems to be much as it used to be then surely pacing does not entail perpetuating disability...

Well that is no problem to anyone other than those of you who have a vested interest in such treatments Mr Kennair. If we have no particular reason to think they would work, why offer them?

I was trying to work out what it was - and you beat me to it! A BiMSCID no less.

Editorials are routinely 'commissioned' without any payment though. I have been asked to do several. It may be that Newman did this for free because it helps her publicise herself.

I hadn't thought about this before but it seems odd that a freelance journalist should be writing for the BMJ. Traditionally medical journals have taken material submitted by doctors and scientists without payment. More recently authors have often had to pay to publish. Editorial pieces were...

If I remember rightly Melanie Newman is a journalist with no real understanding of the science who has a strongly held belief in the mind influencing the body. I think she has some experiences of her own that she believes prove this. She sees herself as a patient advocate but is out of her...

My understandings that the level of security was part of a project with funding and collaboration by NIH. I don't think the finger is pointing at China here. It is much closer home. Making bad mistakes with viruses seems to be a fairly widespread aspect of virology. The ongoing legal case over...