Paul Garner on Long Covid and ME/CFS - BMJ articles and other media.

Garner is on record saying he became obsessed with monitoring his symptoms (implying that all ME patients do that - except we don't, a few may but it's not a feature of ME) .... now he appears to have become obsessed with getting publicity by doing press interviews (how many is it now, 80? 90? So many that we lose track).

If he was really frightened, if the threats were genuine, his first stop would be the police, and sure as hell they would advise him to avoid antagonising the alleged threateners.

But we have seen similar lurid allegations fall to pieces in court - where Evidence is required to be produced.
In court all the wild allegations disappeared and the actual 'threats' turned out to be that one researcher was heckled at a seminar. By one individual. Once.


So what's the difference between blabbing lurid victim playing stories to credulous journalists - and making the same allegations in a court of law? The difference is a word that begins with 'P'*, that carries a very heavy sentence in the UK criminal Justice system.


So what did the police say, Paul? What are you going to do about the alleged threats, apart from seeking yet more victim-playing, ME patient-smearing, publicity for yourself?


*Perjury.

 

he says the police were involved ...

ETA not defending him, just sayin

 

If this is all accurate i cant express my frustration with whichever idiots sent these threats (assuming they are threats rather than actual intent, that would be horrific) but talk about counterproductive. This will follow us for decades.

Stand by for the follow up reports in the broadsheets

 

The funny thing about this is: these people have lost the scientific debate years ago. Their ideas are simply without merit, and smearing their critics in the press won't change a thing about that.

In the PACE trial, which was presented as definitive test of the CBT/GET approach, there was no difference at followup between the groups. The authors spun that as success and this might work to influence the general public, but will not work when a careful analysis is performed of these claims, for example by NICE. Whenever such dishonest claims are made, the CBT/GET approach loses more credibility.

 

And in 2013 journalist Michael Hanlon claimed that the Metropolitan Police had a whole unit dedicated to monitoring 'ME Activists'. Hanlon also said nobody at the Met Police would comment .....
"Probably because no such ‘specialised unit’ existed" was the conclusion of David J Black in Scottish Legal News
https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/david-j-black-welcome-to-the-machine


Reporting on the supposedly 'dangerous extremist militant threat-issuing ME extremists' (further to the claims Hanlon made) Fiona Fox asserted that profiles of 'ME Activists' had been compiled ... and that the typical 'ME Extremist' was female, 40s, and had an expression that indicated a higher level of education than they actually had (I paraphrased that last one). That of course gave the impression that 'ME Extremists' were being very closely profiled indeed. And are typically women. Which is odd. As 75%-85% of ME sufferers are female. And the alleged threats are not typical female behaviour, as violent crimes, and threats, are predominantly committed by men.

No evidence for all those lurid allegations, or the multitude of surrounding detail, was produced in court, where substantiating the allegations that ME patients are 'dangerous' really mattered for the accusers case to withhold PACE data. They lost the case for the PACE data. The need to hide the PACE data, and portraying the patient advocates as dangerous, nasty and therefore untrustworthy, being, in the view of astute patients and advocates, the entire purpose of the media smear blitzes of the early 2010s.

Those are the media stories which Garner now models his own very similar victim playing stories on.

 

I'm not in any way supporting the veracity of the claims @Lou B Lou I was just pointing out that it wasnt factually accurate to say that

But the article says the police were involved, whether the article is factually correct is another question.

 

I just feel despairing about the whole situation I find it really distressing.

 

Garners article is in The Post, an online paper that is local to Liverpool. The Post has 13,000 readers, it says.

It looks like Garner has turned to and chatted up a local Liverpool journalist, and also directed the journalist to Natalie Shure's NR article. It would appear that Garner couldn't get his dangerously lurid accusations into a mainstream national paper. I do wish he would turn to a different target, one where he would do less damage to a vulnerable, stigmatised and medically abused patient population.

 

I probably won’t live to see the full ramifications of Natalie Shure’s incursion into this space, as I’m on the older side. I would conjecture that her shadow will loom over ME sufferers for decades to come. It’s a harrowing prospect for younger patients

 

He very clearly has not been deplatformed or cancelled at any rate... he is giving a talk on 'how to recover from covid' imminently isnt he? at the conference in Norway or Netherland or somewhere with Sharpe etc? i cant find the link its on one of the other threads

ETA: See link to conference in post #1960 - the talk will be given in Finland
(Post moved - thread on the conference here: Finland: 2023 Helsinki University Long Covid conference)

 

Yes, you are correct Jem. He did say he had contacted the police, I don't know how I missed that part, probably mind boggled by the whole repeating zombie 'militant threatening ME patients' meme coming back to life again, after we thought it had been dispatched.

But I do think of how all the wild and lurid allegations made by 'we know who' in 2011/12/13/16 all fizzled out when it came to producing actual evidence/sworn statements for court. And the allegations were given short shrift by David J Black in the Scottish Legal News.

https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/david-j-black-welcome-to-the-machine

 

I’d love to be cancelled like Paul Garner – and all the other high profile people one is constantly hearing from in the media about how they are being cancelled. I wonder how long it will be before Garner is given a column in the Daily Telegraph to complain about being silenced.

One of many things that frustrates me with the Garner narrative is that none of the journalists seem to bother to research the history of what he himself has said in print – that ME/CFS services are institutionally prejudiced, how he was grateful to people with ME for helping with helping him with advice on pacing, how he was taking long walks every day without any PEM, all before he claims to have recovered by changing his thoughts.

If one is to accept his current narrative, then he appears to be saying that it was his faulty cognitions that perpetuated his illness. Why do journalists not question the current cognitions of someone who claims to have a history of faulty cognitions?

My impression is that Garner had a very common type of post-viral syndrome, which like most post-viral syndromes resolved with sensible management. On top of that, for reasons I don’t understand, he appears to have interpreted his very normal experience in a way which is both unscientific and harmful to others.

 

The alleged email quoted in the article was from *August 2021!*. Why on earth would he wait a year and a half to make it public? Perhaps because Garner's standard story has become rather old hat, he's repeated it so many times (is it 80 times, or was that the figure last year?), so ramping up the narrative with threats and Interpol involvement was needed to create new interest from the ever credulous and excitable reading public.


The Comments to the article all appear to have lapped up everything the journalist wrote - apart from one, which makes good points and links to the published critical response to Natalie Shure's article signed by a number of Health Care Professionals.

Frankly I have lost hope in human beings. So many out there virtually hunting sick/disabled people for profit, publicity or sport. And so many eager to join in.

 

OK this gets into clown territory. Interpol doesn't deal with minor trifle like this, good grief this is as realistic as saying there's an army unit on call just in case. Interpol deals with serious crime, organized crime, most-wanted people, terrorism, coordinating across national police forces. This is ridiculous.

People randomly send death threats on the Internet. Many patients get them for speaking out. There is an unnamed actress in a major video game that has received years of death threats because people don't like her role. This has nothing to do with us and we are not responsible for what random people do.

Police struggle to respond to clear warnings of people preparing to commit violent crimes because there are so many, they don't waste time with nonsense like this. You can contact then all you want because the Sun is too bright, doesn't mean a damn thing.

What hubris to claim he ever was some kind of "hero", when actually what happened is that people rushed to help him. What an ungrateful person. You definitely belong with the rest whining about "cancel culture" out there, as it was always about basic human decency.

 

It's a convenient lie that allows ableist attitudes to become socially acceptable. Most people are happy to continue to treat patients like us without respect or consideration. I think money plays a big role in this too, governments and insurance companies want the cheaper option of psychogenic attribution (Which is actually more expensive in the long run). The other thing is people don't want to admit that they were wrong all these years/decades.

If anybody has more reasons then please post them.

 

This whole Garner story reminds me a bit of South Park's recent Worldwide Privacy Tour episode...