Mick Hartley

Stuart Ritchie at the Spectator – How the Lancet lost our trust:

The journal’s role as the mouthpiece of the medical establishment couldn’t have been clearer in February last year, when it published a group letter organised by the zoologist Peter Daszak on the origins of the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus. As well as ‘strongly condemn[ing] conspiracy theories’ that the virus did not have a natural origin, the letter expressed ‘solidarity’ with all scientists and health workers in China, ending with some oddly Soviet-era phrasing: ‘Stand with our colleagues on the front line! We speak in one voice.’

The letter didn’t reveal that Daszak was himself involved with virological research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab at the centre of the ‘lab leak’ speculation. Medical journals are usually hyper-aware of potential conflicts of interest — for instance, if a clinical trial was funded by a pharmaceutical company — but in this case the Lancet let it slide.

In retrospect, now that the lab leak theory is taken far more seriously, this looks at best misconceived and at worst rather suspect. None of it makes the theory any more plausible of course (we should remain sceptical but open-minded, and await the results of the continuing investigation). But it was an unforced error.

It’s not just the scientists and health workers of China that the Lancet has praised. In May last year, its editor-in-chief Richard Horton appeared on the state-owned broadcaster China Central Television to praise how ‘tremendously decisively’ the Chinese Communist party had handled the pandemic. He also penned multiple editorials about China, including one entitled ‘Covid-19 and the Dangers of Sinophobia’. This did mention ‘the case against China’, including ‘the repression of the Uighur people’ and ‘belligerence towards Taiwan’. But it went on to write these off as mere ‘perceived encroachments on liberties’, concluding that, essentially, we should all just get along: ‘a pandemic is a moment for conciliation, respect, and honesty between friends.’

If the modern Lancet has a patchy record in holding the establishment — or, at least, certain establishments — to account, how is it doing in the fight against [Lancet founder] Wakley’s other bugbear, the quacks and frauds? For that, we have to look beyond the editorial and correspondence pages and into the scientific research published in the journal. Alas, some of the most famous stories of scientific fraud have originated at the Lancet during Horton’s tenure as editor.

The best-known is, of course, that of Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced doctor who managed to get an almost entirely faked paper on autism and the MMR vaccine published in the Lancet in 1998. It wasn’t retracted for 12 years, all the while allowing the worst anti-vaxxers to claim that their ideas had been taken seriously by a prestigious journal.

No less disturbing is the case of Paolo Macchiarini, the flamboyant surgeon who was apparently able to transplant artificial tracheas into human patients. Many of those patients ended up dead, the operations a dangerous failure, but Macchiarini claimed in the Lancet (and elsewhere) that the surgery had been a success.

Other Lancet scandals haven’t concerned outright fraud, but highly questionable research that nonetheless got through the filter. Critics of the Iraq war were re-energised when, in 2006, the journal published a paper estimating that more than 650,000 excess deaths had been caused by the war and subsequent occupation. This seemed almost unbelievable, and indeed other studies found a far lower toll. The authors of the Lancet study were heavily criticised for their methodology — surveying specific parts of Iraqi cities that would have likely had higher tolls, thus inflating the figures — as well as for failing to be open and transparent about important aspects of the research.

That lack of openness is also what caused a firestorm about the PACE trial, a study of exercise and psychotherapy for chronic fatigue syndrome published by the journal in 2011. This was a classic demonstration of the importance of transparency: critics of the study (of whom there are many) had to make a Freedom of Information request and wait years to see the data — at which point their re-analysis showed far less impressive results than the original.

And even though the Lancet has carried some of the most important research on Covid, it blotted its copybook by publishing, in May 2020, a paper by Harvard researchers claiming that the drug hydroxy-chloroquine led to a higher death rate in Covid patients. Although it was catnip to those who wanted to get another one over on Donald Trump — an on-the-record fan of the ultimately useless drug — publishing the paper turned out to have been a terrible decision. The Harvard researchers had been given all the results from a dodgy company by the name of Surgisphere, and when they asked Surgisphere for the raw data to check some anomalies, they were rebuffed. None of the Harvard scientists, or the Lancet’s reviewers or editors, had ever thought to check the data before publication. It all resulted in another messy retraction just two weeks after the paper appeared.

Richard Horton has been The Lancet's editor since 1995. I think it's fair to say that his grandstanding left-wing opinions have played a considerable part in the Lancet's decline over the past 25 years. As I noted a couple of weeks back, he published a letter in Lancet in 2014 from a number of pro-Palestinian activists which the Israeli Ministry of Health characterised as “bordering on blood libel". Some of the letter’s authors were later revealed to have links to antisemitic groups. Two had shared a video of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, railing against Jews and Israel. One author had forwarded a message claiming that Jews and Zionists were behind the Boston marathon bombings. Horton announced in response that while he “deeply regretted” the “completely unnecessary polarisation” the letter caused, he stopped short of condemning the letter itself, and kept it up on The Lancet’s website. And refused to publish a rebuttal. In fact, as shown here, the Lancet under Horton has quite a history of publishing anti-Israel propaganda.

As well as publishing the dodgy Iraq War figures mentioned above, he also railed against "the axis of Anglo-American imperialism" at a 2006 rally in Manchester, and was happy to publish an article titled Neoliberal economics, planetary health, and the COVID-19 pandemic: a Marxist ecofeminist analysis last year, which referred positively to a paper which Horton himself had co-authored.

Then there was the case of Professor Sir Roy Meadow:

Horton published an article in 2005 supporting Professor Sir Roy Meadow who had been charged with serious professional misconduct by the GMC for giving erroneous and seriously misleading evidence in the Sally Clark trial. This was especially controversial as the article appeared whilst the GMC proceedings were still under away and was published on the first day of Meadow's defence. The article "incensed" Clark, a solicitor who had been the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice. With the support of erroneous statistical (and other) evidence from Meadow the prosecution wrongly convicted her of murder and she spent over three years in prison before her successful second appeal.

Her husband wrote a rebuttal letter to The Lancet in order to correct Horton's 'many inaccuracies and one-sided opinions' and to prevent them prejudicing independent observers. James Le Fanu, medical practitioner and writer, also wrote to The Lancet in the same issue and described Horton's words as 'mischief'. The Clark family issued a statement addressing and countering with established fact each of the points making up Horton's biased support of Meadow.

Quite a litany of poor judgement, then. Makes no difference, though: he's still editor-in-chief.