Concerns about Cochrane

As usual for this Board, this statement is misleading. I will not go into details here, but a charity with Cochrane’s history and structure should probably not have any unelected board members. You can see the end result of appointed members right now. Concentration of power in the central executive staff.
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The Board’s authoritarian disposition and their push for more power to be centralized at Cochrane should scare every member, particularly the collaborating centers, who the Board clearly no longer sees as collaborators, but as subordinates. The Board and executive staff have unilaterally decided that collaboration is no longer how Cochrane functions and they are aggressively enforcing that silent coup. They have removed a dissenting voice in an absurd process and used that process to purge the Board of all other dissenting votes.
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https://therealrthorat.video.blog/2018/10/24/authoritarianism-at-cochrane/
 
Forgot to add, that whole blogpost is worth a read for those concered about the inner workings and governance of cochrane.

Includes analysis of several of the remaing boards statements, and how they are misleading about what the rules they cite really are ment to be about etc.
 
Oh, the saga is not yet over....



Rigshospitalet has exempted Professor Peter Gøtzsche from service on Tuesday. The current deputy director of the Nordic Cochrane Center takes over as head of the research institute.
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https://translate.google.no/transla...gdom___Sundhed/article10989360.ece&edit-text=

https://medwatch.dk/secure/Sygdom___Sundhed/article10989360.ece (danish source - paywall, but the preview have the cited quote)

Petition letter in his support

https://www.ageofautism.com/2018/11...tm_campaign=Feed:+ageofautism+(AGE+OF+AUTISM)

The letter is penned by:

David Hammerstein, Former Member of the Cochrane Governing Board (2017-2018) and former Member of the European Parliament (2004-2009)

Tom Jefferson MD MRCGP FFPHM, Senior Associate Tutor, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG Member, Cochrane Collaboration (1994 - current)
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https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/letter-to-danish-minister-of-health-against
 
Abstract
The mission of the Cochrane Collaboration, established in 1993, was to systematically review medical evidence with a view to producing the best quality and trustworthy evidence. Twenty-five years later, it is in a crisis that centres on the dismissal one of its founders and the question of access to clinical trial data. The original mission aimed at improving health. In the face of stalling life expectancies, the stakes in the current crisis could not be higher. This essay looks at the crisis in the context of the disastrous effects of medication for paediatric depression on children as a consequence of the suppression of adverse findings from clinical trials
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We're not the only ones with negative consequense from null-findings beeing reported as positive studies, hidden data and government recommandations based on bad advice :-(


While every director of a Cochrane centre has a responsibility to the mouths they have to feed, how can the Cochrane organisation justify tolerating 15 years’ worth of reviews based on ghost-written articles and no scrutiny of trial data due to lack of access? Surely, this has been as deep a betrayal of the core Cochrane mission as it is possible to imagine.
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http://ijme.in/articles/the-crisis-...ed-medicine/?galley=html#.W-B0LGYKq-k.twitter
 
the BMJ Opinion
Peter C Gøtzsche: Cochrane - no longer a Collaboration

In my view, the Board and the CEO should resign. They should resign from their posts and call for independent elections to be held and respect the requests from 31 centre directors and many others for an independent investigation of the “process” against me. It’s the only way to restore this great organisation to what it once was.

The ultimate excuse for ousting me from Cochrane was my “seriously bad behaviour.” If questioning our leadership, holding the drug industry to account and criticising bad science qualifies as “seriously bad behaviour,” then I am proud to own it.


 
Mentions several things he tried to do/change from within during his time on the board, including this - important to us:

I wrote a policy a year ago that would prevent Cochrane authors from having a commercial interest in the interventions they were assessing. The Cochrane leadership stalled.
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And he has submitted a complaint to the Charity Commission.
 
There is now a petition in support of Peter Gøtzsche:

Letter to Danish Minister of Health against dismissal of Peter Gotzsche

Initiators are:
David Hammerstein former member of the Cochrane Governing Board and former Member of the European Parliament
Tom Jefferson MD MRCGP FFPHM, Senior Associate Tutor, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG Member, Cochrane Collaboration

The petition has 5,872 signatures by now
 
From november 9th, in "Sundhedspolitisk tidsskrift" - (journal for health politics) -
Vaccine research: We need Gøtzsche


The storm, which Peter Gøtzsche has come out this fall, is largely a symptom of a bad development in the Cochrane Collaboration, which increasingly allows researchers with ties to drug companies to participants in study gennemgangene, she believes.

"I will not put my head on the block, but I think that more than half of the scientists on the Protocol to the Cochranes HPV-review had ties to those parts of the industry that make the vaccines, and Gøtzsche and his colleagues demonstrated that the first author to review has ties to the companies. Cochrane was for getting to grips with the problems that the industry evaluates itself, and now it has even allowed himself to infiltrate so Cochrane of the industry, and oh damn when, where is it a day of mourning for the people who want unbiased critical assessment of What we use of differential treatment, if Peter Gøtzsche gets fired on the background. That is why I have signed up to support the letter, "says Christine Stabell Benn.
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https://sundhedspolitisktidsskrift.dk/nyheder/1486-vaccineforsker-vi-har-brug-for-gotzsche.html


https://www.microsofttranslator.com...-vaccineforsker-vi-har-brug-for-gotzsche.html
 
Things seems to still be happening - another critique of the hvp-review is on it's way.




Not sure if this is posted in the thread already, but he wrote this opinion piece nov. 12th - about how cochrane reviews can both amplifie and hide biases, and even giving the industry a roadmap on how to pass the checks whle hiding what they don't want the spotlight on (guidlines for reviewers etc). Much of the same goes for "our own" cbt/get-industry :/

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/11/12/tom-jefferson-cochrane-pharma-good-turn/
 
inox said:
Not sure if this is posted in the thread already, but he wrote this opinion piece nov. 12th - about how cochrane reviews can both amplifie and hide biases, and even giving the industry a roadmap on how to pass the checks whle hiding what they don't want the spotlight on (guidlines for reviewers etc). Much of the same goes for "our own" cbt/get-industry :/

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/11/12/tom-jefferson-cochrane-pharma-good-turn/
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I hadn't seen that, and thought it was interesting. A few bits seemed relevant to us. I've been interested by the way that some PACE defenders have tried to use checklists as a way of avoiding critical thinking:

However, the other side of the coin has largely avoided scrutiny. By providing a roadmap of what should be included in a journal submission and how it will be appraised we have furnished a great facilitator for writers trying to get their product (the submission) accepted for publication. “Tell me what you are looking for and I will make sure it’s there.”
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I'm not sure what thread is most appropriate for this, but there's a new piece from Ioannidis on this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/eci.13058

I think I agree with this point:

One may also argue that the extremely critical positions of PG fuel anti-
science, e.g. anti-vaccine movements. This argument is unfounded. In fact, anti-
science nonsense may be fueled more by his expulsion when quacks like MMR
vaccine deniers (who actually PG has fought against) can weaponize that a scientific
critic with such strong credentials was dismissed with petty machinations.
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I'm worried that Cochrane is currently in a weakened position that makes it more difficult to bring about the sort of changes that we want to see. IMO it's now much more politically difficult for them to go against Wessely and his allies than it was six months ago, and that could be why we saw them back-down over their plan to withdraw the Larun exercise review (this is just guesswork on my part):

However, recently
much of that accumulated moral and scientific capital was expended in a series of
sad events. The Cochrane Governance Board voted to expel from the Board and
Cochrane one of its own members, Peter Goetzsche (PG) who also served as
director of the Nordic Cochrane Center. Four other members of the Board resigned
in protest. A process was set forth to replace them. PG tried to withdraw the Nordic
Center from Cochrane, but he was sacked by the Danish ministry of health from his
directorship and from his clinical professor position at the Rigshospitalet and
University of Copenhagen. Some 9,000 people signed a petition complaining fiercely
against the decision (3) and many (including myself) have written their own
additional letters to the minister to support PG.
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There was the recent post saying Cochrane was strengthening their COI policy:

A lot of evidence-
based medicine activities, including randomized trials and systematic reviews have
been hijacked by financial conflicts and expert-based ideology (14,15), but hopefully
this had not happened yet to Cochrane. Conversely, now this collaboration
apparently seems to get hijacked primarily by marginal bureaucracy without vision,
not necessarily by conflicts. Nevertheless, there is a threat that, so weakened, it will
then also be easily hijacked at scale by financial or other conflicts, e.g. if conflict of
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
interest policies become inappropriately relaxed for systematic review authors and
reviewers. These policies need to be reinforced, not weakened.
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Letter published today at BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine by Catherine Riva et al:
Lessons learnt on transparency, scientific process and publication ethics. The short story of a long journey to get into the public domain unpublished data, methodological flaws and bias of the Cochrane HOP vaccines review

Six years of missed opportunities for correcting basic issues have passed by. Now, recent events seem to confirm that we can hardly count on Cochrane anymore for a rigorous assessment of the evidence. Considering the methodological flaws and the review team’s COIs, we must accept that Cochrane’s conclusions on HPV vaccines are based on poor science and thus not relevant.

Given that every attempt to make analyses and unpublished data public has failed, we have just uploaded all contents on Zenodo.9At least now, they are available to the public and to the scientific and medical community
 
That sounds pretty significant, as well as clarifying the Cochrane issues with ME are by no means unique. Unless Cochrane buck their ideas up pretty fast, their name is going to slide ignominiously and irretrievably into the gutter. And only themselves to blame.
 
Familiar problems here: outcome switching and post-hoc analysis.

Ironically, seems like the feigned outrage at Cochrane's ultimatum, making it an unreliable dish rag according to the psychosomatic ideologues, was almost correct, just exactly the opposite way and for the wrong reasons.

In a different time, you just know these people would be howling about the insanity of the germ theory of disease and how it's fatally wrong to argue the nonsense of tiny organisms causing disease when theories of the mind perfectly explain, as long as you don't actually require any objective evidence or ability to predict anything.

 
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