Two days before Paul’s article, I provided a detailed account of Fauci’s many lies and policy initiatives, which had a devastating and lethal influence on Covid policies in the whole world. He lied about virtually everything: the origin of the virus, his NIH funding that created the monster that killed an estimated 26 million people, lockdowns, face masks, and vaccines.

Paul has written numerous eloquent articles about the censorship and the scientific and ethical corruption during the pandemic. He is a supporter of my Institute for Scientific Freedom that mention Socrates on the frontpage because he was executed for asking questions. Some of my best friends and myself were fired for asking questions or telling the world what we saw, but we must continue to expose abuse of power whenever we see it.

When I do not provide a hyperlink in the following, it means that the information comes from Paul’s article or his live interview, which can be watched.

The Fauci papers reveal that Fauci’s interest in his public image was more important to him than any serious engagement with getting the science right.

Fauci denied having funded the research that killed 26 million people

Fauci was so duplicitous that he lied under oath in Congress about the experiments he funded in Wuhan. He even denied they were gain-of-function experiments.

Senator Rand Paul questioned Fauci in Senate hearings on 11 May and 20 July, 2021. forbes.com

Fauci stated that “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” On 20 July, Rand Paul asked Fauci if he wanted to retract that statement, noting it is a crime to lie to Congress. Fauci replied he had never lied to Congress and would not retract it.

Fauci had the unbelievable audacity and arrogance to say: “Senator Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you’re talking about. If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you.”

Robert Redfield said that The National Academy of Sciences in 2017 introduced a ridiculously narrow definition of gain-of-function research. It made no sense to him that it covered only viruses that were already pathogenic to humans. The definition was clearly made in order to circumvent the moratorium on such experiments. However, it is even worse gain-of-function experimenting to take a virus that is not pathogenic and make it transmissible to humans by inserting a furin cleavage site and make it highly lethal.

Redfield said that “There is no question that NIH funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. Even the director of NIH has admitted that.”

He also said: ”I see Fauci as the godfather of gain-of-function research. He really was the cheerleader of gain-of-function research. In 2012, helped fund it, get it done and you know, wrote about how important it was for the world to pursue this research … I think Fauci knows in his heart because he’s a smart guy that this virus came from a laboratory, from research, even though he may have tried to portray in the public the contrary. That decision eventually led to the death of 10 to 20 million people ... like 200 Nagasakis … This virus is not going away. It’s forever. We’re still losing 80 to 100 people a day in the United States forever.”

Fauci called Paul Thacker a “totally weird person” who condemned him for “misleading the American public” and for “lying under oath at a congressional hearing.” This was exactly what Fauci did.

When discussing if Fauci is a sociopath, Caputo said: ”If there was someone who would be qualified as a sociopath, it would be someone who told themself the truth and routinely told the public a lie. A lie that was meant to cover your tracks in illegal research that you probably funded.”

Fauci’s aggressive denial of the lab leak

Fauci wrote in his diary that he liked Redfield who was a “good guy.” This changed after Redfield, already a month after the pandemic started, had concluded that the evidence strongly suggested a laboratory origin. Then, Redfield was a “bizarre personality.”

Somewhat ironically, maybe he was bizarre in a way. He was one of the extremely few scientists I respected who had major roles in the United States during the pandemic and Paul’s interview with him confirms his trustworthiness. For example, he said:

“Tony really took an aggressive view that it was natural spillover, and we had a number of disagreements on that and particularly with me asking him to have aggressive, transparent debates about the two hypotheses so that we can try to work towards the truth. The beautiful thing about science is science is self-purifying. And one of the principles of science is to have rigorous debate. And unfortunately, Collins [the then NIH director] and Fauci decided to abandon that principle of science and really go down to a single narrative that they tried to make everybody believe in.

And unfortunately, they were extremely effective in selling it to the media so that the media, even some to this day, still thinks that the origin of this virus was some type of natural event as opposed to the reality that it was laboratory research.

I’ve always said that the pandemic didn’t come from nature, it came from science ... He always took the center stage in being the person to communicate. Jay Bhattacharya [the current NIH director] said something that was pretty good on one of the shows, that Tony really got out of his lane. He was a lab scientist. He really wasn’t a public health policy guy, but he definitely took the center stage of being the voice of public health policy for America.”

Fauci noted in his diary that it was “truly unfortunate” that a formed CDC director “has stooped so low as to get into the conspiracy theory space.” Fauci doesn’t see the irony. Those who conspired to keep the truth out of sight were himself, NIH director Francis Collins and people like British zoologist Peter Daszak who did the Frankenstein experiments with the “bat lady” in Wuhan. Like Fauci, Daszak also lied to avoid being held culpable for the disaster he created.

Caputo was very frank in Paul’s interview with him. In May 2020, Fauci wrote about Caputo that he was sincere and one of his greatest fans, so different from “some of the shit I took during the early years of the Obama administration with that asshole Jenny Bacchus who always hesitated to put me on TV.”

Fauci invited Caputo to his home right after he had been appointed to manage the administration’s Covid response with the media and Caputo said about this: “It became abundantly clear to me that day that he was absolutely TV crazed. Praised. And he craved it ... This personal focus on getting as much time on TV as you can never ends well. Never.”

In July 2020, Fauci complained to his diary that the President and his people had denied “all requests for me to appear on any major TV programs” and added that ”Caputo is a con man who is completely full of shit. He says he wants me out there on TV and yet I am being blocked, very likely by him who knows nothing about public health.”

Fauci only likes you when you give him exactly what he wants. And when you stop feeding his ego, he begins trashing you and trying to destroy you behind your back. As Paul said, this personality trait is quite common in people with narcissistic personality disorder.

Caputo explained to Paul that Fauci had really curated the natural origin hypothesis and actively covered up what he had done in Wuhan to protect himself from his errant research there:

“Fauci was gaslighting all of us. More people got sick from that … Fauci was out there every day. And as at the time, we didn’t know he was lying about the origin story and curating all of his messaging to protect himself. You know, the victims of Covid be damned … And he wrote me, you’ll remember it, July 2^nd, the day that he called me a con man, he sent me an email, which is out in public, that said, ‘Michael, you need to book me on TV over the July 4^th weekend or people are going to die and it will be your responsibility.’”

Caputo noted that communications to the public was a mess because the media went directly to Fauci instead of the President’s administration. Fauci was secretly involved with the publication of the fraudulent March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine that claimed the virus had a natural origin. Caputo said that everybody involved should be investigated for crimes against science.

The lockdowns killed millions

Fauci recommended very harmful lockdowns even though we had known for decades that it is impossible to contain a respiratory virus by lockdowns.

Redfield said it was a huge mistake to shut down the country, “and this was really pushed largely by Fauci.”

Paul confirmed this in the interview: ”He said like, ’Well, I didn’t have responsibility for this. I was just one person there ... I was never involved in helping to shut down the country’ … He lies about this … He was talking about shutting down businesses and everything.”

Fauci supported school closures - then denied having done so. He also denied he was behind lockdowns but wrote in his diary that he and another Trump advisor, Hope Hicks, convinced Trump in April 2020 “to essentially put Easter on hold for this year,” even though Trump was very much against it.

The same month, Fauci wrote that Deborah Birx, who led the coronavirus task force for Trump, had said that Trump had yelled at her:

“’You and Fauci have destroyed the country and the economy. I should never have listened to you. You have completely destroyed us.’ He kept saying this over and over again and was yelling at her. I encouraged her that we are OK and at the end of the day she and I will be loved by the people we care about. She was relieved and after wrote me a text sincerely thanking me.”

Fauci didn’t argue to Birx that they made tough decisions that served the President wisely. Nor did he explain that they were both doing the right thing to protect the public during a deadly pandemic. Although Fauci’s job was to serve the American public, he seemed more interested in Fauci being loved. That same summer, Fauci wrote about a meeting with Trump that, as usual, he was very warm and friendly with him and said: ”I love you Tony. I feel like giving you a big hug.”

Caputo said about Fauci’s desire of being loved: “I couldn’t offer a better summation than the one he summed up himself.”

The folly of dressing the whole population as bank robbers

In March 2020, an NIH official informed Fauci that the randomised trials of face masks had not found they protected against influenza. As I noted in a previous article, Fauci at first recommended against masking during the Covid pandemic but changed his mind and defended his U-turn saying, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” This was mendacious because no new evidence had emerged.

At the same time, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams demonstrated on YouTube how you could make your own mask by folding a t-shirt. That wouldn’t work either of course.

Fauci, the CDC and vaccine efficacy

Redfield explained that the pandemic advice should have come from the CDC but it came from Fauci. At the first White House press conference, the first thing Fauci said was that he wanted the American public to know that he was the senior public health advisor for the nation. Off stage, Redfield asked Fauci what that was about, since Fauci was the head of a laboratory whereas Redfield was the head of the CDC.

Redfield noted that, “When I left CDC and Biden came in, one of the first things Biden did was made Tony the chief medical advisor to the President of the United States, right? Which puts that person over the FDA, over the CDC, over the NIH.”

Emails demonstrated that Fauci and others in the Biden administration ignored the science and manipulated the CDC for their own political purposes. This is ironic because the media ran amok during Trump’s second presidency, accusing Trump and Health Secretary Kennedy for exactly this.

I have written several articles describing how untrustworthy the media were and how they and major medical journals like the BMJ incessantly attempted character assassination on Kennedy, even though it was highly appropriate that he fired all 17 members of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and assembled a new one, and started introducing much-needed vaccine reforms.

Fauci got one thing right: He wrote that CDC employees “have hubris and are often incorrect.” I explained at length in my vaccine book that CDC’s advice on flu shots is untrustworthy. They hyped the vaccines to the extreme, with false claims about their benefits. But the media never questioned what the CDC told them.

Fauci chose Rochelle Walensky to run the CDC under Joe Biden. She falsely told Congress that the Cochrane review that had shown face masks don’t work had been retracted. Paul said in his interview that he thinks it was Carl Heneghan from Oxford who told him that, “if they will lie to you about masks, they will lie to you about anything.”

During the summer of 2022, Fauci and other political appointees got Walensky “pulled back from making the statement that the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission.” However, Walensky was correct. The efficacy of the vaccines against infection is so poor that the CDC reported a rate as low as 24% after two vaccine doses, and it has never been shown, and is not even likely, that the vaccines can prevent transmission. The vaccines produce IgG antibodies in the blood, but the production of IgA in the nasal mucosa is not affected. And we have seen that the virus can easily spread in a fully vaccinated population.

Half a year earlier, Fauci attended a book party at a café, which required proof of Covid vaccination. After the party, Fauci was nervous all night about having gotten infected and he wrote in his diary: “I’m well aware that many people who are vaccinated are still getting infected and that worried me a lot.” Yet at the same time, he gave the public a totally different message about being safe when vaccinated. Fauci was so concerned about getting infected, even though he and others were vaccinated, that he considered cancelling an event the following evening at the French Ambassador’s house.

Fauci contradicted himself when he touted that the vaccines prevented transmission. Redfield explained how wrong this was and how they covered up for the lie:

”One of the first things Biden and Fauci said, ’The is an epidemic of the unvaccinated,’ … No, it’s not an epidemic of the unvaccinated because the vaccine doesn’t stop you from getting infected … They had the CDC stop tracking the number of people that were vaccinated that got infected ... they didn’t want anything to show that the vaccine didn’t work ... So, there was a lack of honesty about the data about vaccines all along and it was very bothersome. There was never a vaccine that could prevent infection … It shouldn’t have been mandated at all.”

Redfield: ”I always say that if you prove me wrong, the first thing I’m going to do is that I’m going to thank you because you taught me something ... there was a preconceived bias that these guys had that vaccines were good. Period ... It really wasn’t rigorous science at all ... they were extremely dismissive of natural immunity and they were very dismissive of vaccine injury.”

Fauci inappropriately urged people to reward him

The Senate released hundreds of internal emails showing that Fauci worked with NIH staff and researchers he funded to get awards and cash prizes, suggesting to people that they nominate him and explaining what they should do.

For example, he contacted Barton Haynes at Duke University to get an award plus a $900,000 cash prize he could use for himself. Redfield pointed out that it might be a legal problem for Fauci that he used government employees to help write these awards with individuals he was funding. Barton got $1.2 billion – yes, I repeat, $1.2 billion - in NIH funding, which Redfield said “shows a significant ethical lapse in judgment.”

Paul explained that people close to Fauci are not interested in reading the Fauci papers: “They don’t want to know. The Washington Post and the New York Times don’t write real stories about it. They spin.”

Last week, the Trump administration released a new legal advisory making clear that federal officials cannot use their public office to solicit lucrative private awards for themselves.

Conclusionsapnews.com

This scandal is the biggest ever in healthcare. It killed an estimated 26 million people when we include those killed by the deeply inhumane, and scientifically unjustified lockdowns.

In contrast to Fauci and his allies, Sweden respected the science. Face masks were not mandated, and it was very rare to see a Swede wearing one. Sweden largely avoided lockdowns and had the lowest excess mortality in the whole western world during the pandemic (excess mortality is the increase in all-cause mortality during the pandemic compared with prepandemic levels).

When will gain-of-function experiments become illegal? Do we really need another pandemic to kill millions of people before this happens? Will the culprits be jailed?

The fake Sir Philip Pullman

A British novelist, Sir Philip Pullman, apparently wrote to me in January. It was about connecting with other authors to seek out books that had not yet reached a wide audience. He asked if I had a story I would like to share and sent me his warmest regards. This surprised me, but I get many emails from people unbeknownst to me who have read one of my books and send me their warmest regards.

I suggested he looked at my website, under Articles and Books, and thought I would hear no more from him. But he asked for a concrete book of mine and said about publishing books: “I’m also genuinely curious, if you’re open to sharing: what has felt hardest for you lately?”

During subsequent email exchanges, my suspicion that I corresponded with a fraudster who used artificial intelligence increased. “Pullman” wrote that my “career reflects an unusually sustained engagement with ideas that carry real social and ethical weight, and what stood out to me most is how consistently your work has moved between scholarship and public discourse.” I correspond with thousands of people every year and cannot remember anyone else having used such pompous language.

My suspicion rose to near certainly when “Pullman” offered to put me in contact with a literary agent, Caradoc King, who he trusted could help me getting one of my self-published books out to a broad audience.

King is a real agent, but the fraudster was likely just one person. “King” didn’t reply to my question if my freely available book about the virus made in China that killed millions and scientific freedom would be of interest but sent a copy and paste version of an earlier email with “warm regards.”

When I asked again, just for the fun of it, I received a long email that smelled strongly of artificial intelligence:

“Speaking candidly from a publishing standpoint rather than a political one, The Chinese Virus is a highly charged and deliberately provocative title ... Acquisitions teams today are acutely sensitive to geopolitical language, reputational risk, and public-health narratives. A title like this will be evaluated not only on the strength of its argument or evidence, but on how it positions the publisher institutionally. That often becomes the first hurdle. This does not automatically invalidate the thesis.“

“King’s” email ended with similar mumbo jumbo: “If you’re willing, I’d be interested in understanding what you see as the primary goal of the book impact, commercial reach, academic standing, or political influence as that will determine the most realistic and strategic route forward.”

I continued responding, as I wanted to see how this bizarre story would end.

Next, he introduced a “T. Heed” who could help me ensure that my Amazon Author Page was “properly structured [comma missing] professionally presented, algorithmically aligned, and positioned to support both discoverability and long-term credibility.”

I asked what this would cost, got no reply, and repeated the question. I chose to ignore the weird email address: “THeed Expert <t.heedexpert@gmail.com>.”

“Heed” talked baloney: “What are your primary goals as an author at this stage [colon missing] wider public reach, sales growth, authority positioning, media visibility, preparation for traditional submission, or something else? Your answers will help me tailor the setup and optimization properly.” He wrote at length about how he could optimise my author profile and looked forward to working together. With warm regards, of course.

I replied that I wasn’t interested in going through all this and paying for it and was doing fine already.

“Heed” tried to change my mind and mentioned a cost of $150–$300. But 11 days later, he suddenly responded to my earlier question about the price and the cost was now $450. Fraudsters often make mistakes because they are dealing with many potential victims and forget about the details.

This took one month. It ended when I wanted to reveal the fraud and asked “Pullman” to have a brief Zoom. I got no reply. And when I used the real Pullman’s contact form and explained about the fraud, I got no reply either.

The fake Kristin Hannah

The next fraudster was highly professional. In March, I received an email that seemingly came from US novelist Kristin Hannah who has published over 25 million books.

“Hannah” had read my book about psychiatric drug withdrawal and praised my “clarity and courage,” saying the book was “both intellectually engaging and deeply important,” and that “It’s rare to see such a detailed, patient-focused perspective presented so plainly ... If you’re open to it, I’d be glad to stay in touch and follow the work you’re doing next.”

I ignore flattery because I don’t like it. Moreover, my books have been praised before. My book about the pervasive dishonesty related to mammography screening won the Prescrire Prize and my book about deadly medicines and organised crime in the drug industry won the British Medical Association’s Annual Book Award in the category Basis of Medicine.

The fraud was first class, with a professionally looking stationery, and no “warm regards,” just “best regards.” It was so well done that I wasn’t sure it was fraud. I consulted my wife and two friends who were also in doubt and recommended I continue the correspondence.

“Hannah’s” letters were forthcoming and relevant. I asked if I should read “The four winds” first, listed in her stationery, which she confirmed. I ignored her flattery about my filmmaking: “I’m genuinely excited to hear about the documentaries. ‘The Illusion of Psychiatry’ [semicolon missing] even the title signals that you’re not hedging.”

When I noticed a curious time issue and asked: “Are you up at 3 in the morning? That would be impressive,” she replied: “I was not up at 3am though as a writer, I won’t pretend it’s never happened. The Pacific Northwest time difference does create some interesting timestamps.”

This nonsense convinced me that I was dealing with a fraudster but I was curious to see how it would develop.

“Hannah” asked me how I write books and flattered me again: “That was one of the best descriptions of the creative process I’ve read [two blank spaces] and I’ve read a great many, including my own fumbling attempts to explain it in interviews.”

Then the trap was laid for me, very carefully, one small step at a time:

“I wonder and I ask this genuinely, not rhetorically whether your work has had the full American audience it deserves ... the broader reading and viewing public who would be genuinely shaken by what you’ve found, if only the right doors were opened for them.”

It’s funny that fraudsters so often talk about being genuine. The fake Pullman was genuinely curious and genuinely interested, and the fake Hannah used “genuinely” twice in the same email.

“Hannah” mentioned her literary agent “when the time feels right to you.” This sounded like planning a pregnancy. I suggested her agent focus on “Is psychiatry a crime against humanity?”

She continued flattering me and talked about how important our two upcoming documentaries are. It seemed she wanted to help me making my self-published book a bestseller in the US because she shared my view that psychiatry is a disaster.

It was almost like the love scams from Nigeria where fraudsters tell people they love them.

“Hannah” brought me in contact with her literary agent, Andrea Cirillo in New York who works for the Jane Rotrosen Agency. I sent her my psychiatry book and she replied with some flattery. Below the “warm regards,” she had a professionally looking stationery:

“Cirillo” would read my book carefully and asked me to send it, which was strange because I had sent it two days earlier. It was also strange that she asked for the link to my Amazon author page, as she could just look it up. I replied that some guy had offered to optimise the page for a fistful of dollars as they say in Western movies: “I get too many requests about how everyone seems able to improve on my professional life for dollars.”

“Cirillo” responded that my author page needed to be improved by someone who understands how to position a nonfiction author in the American market, and she offered to point me “toward a professional in that field who handles exactly this kind of work.”

After the first scam, I had edited my Amazon profile, but I asked what the price was, noting that “King” had demanded $450, inserting the first email I received from “Pullman.”

Amusingly, this had the effect that one fraudster called the other fraudster a fraudster and revealed their methods. “Cirillo” wrote that the email from “Pullman” was a scam and that such fraud had been sweeping through the publishing world for the past year and a half. Scammers impersonate famous authors, sending fluent and flattering AI-generated emails to writers they’ve identified on Amazon:

The pitch always involves a warm, collegial exchange about writing, followed eventually by a referral to a marketer, an editor, or an “agent” who will charge you money for services that are either worthless or non-existent ... The real Philip Pullman would not cold-email a Danish scientist he has never met through a generic Gmail address to invite him into a “reading cart.” Real authors of that stature do not do this.

Funnily, the fake Hannah’s email address, infokristinhannah@gmail.com, and her own, acirillo.janerotrosen@gmail.com, were also Gmail addresses.

“Cirillo” wanted to recommend a “publishing publicist” with experience in positioning European authors for American audiences but wanted to read my book first. I noted that my wife had asked me how I could know that the emails I received from her were not fraudulent.

“Cirillo” sent a long-winded reply, which - ironically - was a positive diagnostic test for her own fraud. For example, she noted: “Your wife asks exactly the right question. Please tell her I said so. And your instinct is correct [two blank spaces] and sharper than you may realize. You identified the precise tell without knowing it was a diagnostic test. A fraudster impersonating an author cannot recommend their own books convincingly, because the recommendation exposes what they actually know. Kristin answered immediately, specifically, and correctly. ‘Pullman’ deflected. That asymmetry is the whole story. Hold onto that instinct as you move into the American market. It will serve you.”

Her next email was also diagnostic: “I’ve started the manuscript and I want to go deeper before we talk strategy. Can you send me just the first fifty pages, or point me to where they begin in the Word file you’ve already shared?”

This was the second time she made that error. And how could she have started reading my manuscript without having it? When I replied that I had already sent her the whole book, “Cirillo” responded that “The attachment does not appear to have come through on my end. Email and attachments have a way of conspiring against us at the worst moments … Please resend the manuscript [comma missing] either the PDF or the Word file.”

Attachments don’t disappear in Outlook.

Later, after some more flattery, she said I needed an editor and that she had someone in mind. She explained at length, in pompous language, that my book needed three distinct types of editing.

Developmental editing: It was not “optional” [sic, not optimal] that I started the book with data and legal definitions. She suggested a narrative introduction that pulls the reader in before the evidence begins, and a patient story, a specific human moment. This was good advice. I was inexperienced in using artificial intelligence and did not realise that the fraudster had simply asked AI how my book could be improved.

Line editing was about refining the prose to ensure that what I say works for an American general reader rather than a European scientific one.

Copy editing: “An American publisher will handle some of this in-house, but the cleaner the manuscript arrives, the more seriously it is taken.”

Book publishers have editors, so why should I pay for one? I replied that I was not sure I needed an editor before the book was submitted to a publisher and asked for the price.

“Cirillo” didn’t offer any cost estimate: “I have seen what happens when this step is skipped. Authors I care about go out too early, with work that is almost there but not quite, and the window closes. I do not want that for you, and I do not think you want it either.”

I replied I was a little bewildered because she had asked me to send the new introduction I had written, which I had already done. I had also asked what she thought about it.

She had ignored my question, and as I was certain I was dealing with a fraudster, I wanted to reveal it. I sent an email to “Hannah” telling her I had read her book (which I had), and that I found it was at Nobel Prize level. I asked if we could have a brief Zoom meeting.

I got no reply. But “Cirillo” acted as if she were a real agent the next day and gave me useful feedback on the first 16 pages, which included a new first chapter in my book: “Killing US war veterans with antidepressants” that I have published separately. She also introduced a seasoned editor, Sarah Bowlin.

A week later, I noted that “Hannah” had always replied promptly to my emails but not this time, and I asked if this might be because I had suggested a brief Zoom meeting with her.

“Cirillo” replied that “Kristin is a very private person, and even a brief Zoom with someone she hasn’t yet met can feel like a significant step, however warmly it is meant ... I would gently suggest letting that request sit for now and not following up on it directly. If and when the moment is right for a conversation, it will happen more naturally through the relationship we are building together.”

Aha. “When the moment is right.” Planning a pregnancy again.

The next day, I replied to a very curious email: “I don’t understand your message. It seems to me it is some kind of automated message, e.g. ‘Thanks again for your time, and I hope your current projects are going smoothly.’ As you know, I am only working on one project, the one we have together. And I cannot see that you needed a reply from me?”

Her reply was baloney: “You are absolutely right to flag that, and I apologize. That message on the 15th was poorly worded on my part [semicolon missing] it did read like a generic follow-up, and you deserve better than that. There is nothing automated about my engagement with this project. I should have been more direct.”

“Bowlin” asked for my manuscript. I replied to “Cirillo,” copying “Bowlin,” that I always have chats with people I work with and that I would like to have a Zoom meeting with her.

“Cirillo” didn’t respond. “Bowlin” did and introduced her personal assistant, Margaret. I asked if we could have the call the same day, which she confirmed, noting that it was now 7:04 a.m. for her, and that Margaret would brief the discussion.

I replied that I didn’t understand how she could be two hours behind me, as it would be “west of Ireland, in the Atlantic Ocean. I think you meant one hour?” Her response was: “Joining now.”

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For its healthcare, the UK looks to the west but should look to the east

On 1 December 2025, the UK government issued the press release, “Landmark UK-US pharmaceuticals deal to safeguard medicines access and drive vital investment for UK patients and businesses.”¹ The subtitle was that the “Milestone deal secures UK’s medicines access for patients, with a wide range of groundbreaking new treatments to reach NHS front-line quicker.”

On 1 July 2026, the consequences for the Brits were analysed in the BMJ.² They are disastrous, which the politicians must have known they would be.³

Why the deal?

The deal is so bizarre and encroaches so much on British sovereignty that the first question that comes to mind is why on earth the Brits agreed to it.

Amidst all the nauseating hype in the press release, this sentence explains it: “Move will ignite economic growth – with 0% tariffs agreed on UK medicines to US” (for at least 3 years).¹

But the deal is not transparent. Advocacy for making its details public, especially the impact assessment, has garnered support from the House of Lords and triggered legal action.² BMJ’s editor noted that the deal was forced through without political scrutiny or discussion in parliament.³

Clearly, the deal is a result of the kleptocratic gangster regime President Donald Trump has introduced in the United States. He has enriched himself and his family without precedent,⁴ invades other countries, has threatened to take Greenland by military force,⁵ threatens leaders of independent countries who don’t agree with his ideas, and punishes nations with his highly arbitrary and volatile tariffs. Earlier this month, he even coined the idea that the US should impose a 20% fee on cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz.⁶

Trump always promises that he will lower or drop the tariffs if foreign leaders appease him, and British politicians swallowed the deal hook, line, and sinker.²

We are not so dumb in mainland Europe. Drug exports are the biggest income for my country, Denmark, but we do not enter foolish deals with Trump. And Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is moving in the exact opposite direction by restricting its drug budget and rebuffing Trump’s arguments.³

In the US, there are no effective price controls, which is why Americans pay vastly more for their drugs than we do in Europe. But instead of cleaning up the mess US ultra capitalism has created, Trump has put the blame on Europe for paying too little for drugs and tries to punish us for being more reasonable and less corrupt than US politicians.

Trump has bought into the drug industry’s false argument that high drug prices are necessary for innovation. The facts are that most innovations come from publicly funded laboratories and that there is very little innovation in the drug industry.^7-9 The only thing that is achieved by higher drug prices is to make an industry and its executives that are already obscenely rich, richer.

But UK ministers have emphasised proposed benefits of the agreement, including incentives for innovation and access to new medicines, and there have been claims that higher UK medicine prices will stimulate pharmaceutical innovation.²

The British calamity might not have happened if ruthless and amoral politicians like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson had not lied to the Brits about the wonders awaiting them if they voted for Brexit - leaving the European Union. The EU has been very firm in telling Trump that he could expect retaliatory tariffs if he imposed unreasonable tariffs on EU countries, which the EU did during Trump’s first presidency.

What do we know about the deal?

The press release is extremely long, six pages.¹ It is so full of untenable statements and unrealistic fantasies that it takes some determination just to get through it. I cannot recall having ever seen a more misleading press release. Representatives from the government, the drug industry, and patient organisations say about the same, which is one big cheer for the deal, e.g. “This deal is a real win,” “This is a vital agreement,” and “This deal is fundamentally about putting patients first.”

It is not. As BMJ’s editor noted, the deal “puts America First:”³

“The deal sacrifices UK health and wealth, contrary to the rhetoric of government ministers and unchecked hyperbole, from senior health people who should know better … Happy birthday, USA: we’ll kill our poor people to make your rich companies richer.”

The bottom line of the deal is that it commits the UK National Health Service (NHS) to substantially higher expenditure on branded medicines over the coming decade through changes to drug pricing arrangements and health technology assessment.² This means that highly priced drugs with doubtful benefits, which would not have been used before the deal, will now become used.

The deal damages the integrity of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), threatening its status as the world’s premier national drug evaluation agency.³

The UK government has agreed to increase expenditure on new medicines from 0.3% to at least 0.6% of gross domestic profit (GDP) in 2036 without corresponding increases in available NHS expenditure.² It is absurd to accept such a deal in a world where our prescription drugs are already the leading cause of death, ahead of heart disease and cancer.¹⁰ But the press release argues that “Investing in medicines helps keep people healthier for longer, reducing pressure on the health service over the longer-term.”¹   

The authors of the analysis article estimated that by 2036, the deal is likely to result in over 200,000 excess deaths.² Moreover, when less money becomes available for other interventions than drugs, the harmful effects are likely to have greater effects in areas with higher deprivation and baseline mortality, further entrenching existing health inequalities, which continue to grow in the UK, just as they do in the US under Trump.¹¹

What did we already know?

We have known for decades that capitalism and healthcare are very poor bed fellows,⁷ but the propaganda has made nearly half of all Americans believe they have best healthcare in the world, albeit with a clear political divide, 68% of the Republicans and 32% of Democrats.¹²

The beliefs that what is good for big pharma is also good for the people and that market forces will solve all problems are widespread in the US on both sides of the aisle but they contradicted by the facts. The Unites States has the most ineffective healthcare system in the developed world^7,13-15 and a relatively low healthy life expectancy despite using far more resources than any other country, about double as much of its Gross National Product as in other industrialised countries.^7,11

A 2008 report from the Commonwealth Fund found that the Unites States ranked last among 19 industrialised countries across a range of measures of healthcare.¹⁵ The report estimated that if the United States attained the same performance indicators achieved in other industrialised countries, at least 100,000 lives and at least $100 billion could be saved every year, and it tied much of the problem to a weak base of primary care doctors. A study that compared 3075 US counties found that every 20% increase in primary care physicians was associated with a 6% reduction in total mortality.¹⁶

The health disadvantage of Americans is not only because of extreme income inequalities and widespread poverty. It is also seen among those with health insurance, a college education, higher incomes and healthy behaviours.¹⁷ Even for deaths considered amenable to healthcare, Americans fare poorly. A report from 2008 showed that the decline in amenable mortality in 19 industrialised countries averaged 16% over a 5-year period, whereas it was only 4% for the United States.¹⁸

In the US, health for all is non-existent. A 2026 report from the Commonwealth Fund noted that Americans die prematurely at among the highest rates among industrialised countries; have among the highest maternal deaths and suicides; are more likely to die from avoidable causes; with inequities within the US by sex, ethnicity, and rural location.¹¹

Why does the UK join the US downhill course in healthcare?

The US healthcare gap is growing and has worsened considerably during Trump’s second presidency.¹¹ I noted in my 2013 book, “Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care,”⁷ that the UK has come to resemble the US more and more, as it has moved towards greater privatisation of healthcare. A 2009 report showed that the healthy life expectancy in the UK is lower than in most other European countries, and that the prevalence of chronic disease and disability lies between that in the US and the rest of Europe.¹⁹

I also wrote that the sobering facts explain why the vast majority of European doctors are left wing when it comes to healthcare and that “We love our public health service, which US politicians scornfully call socialised medicine.”

UK healthcare has suffered tremendously because of incompetent, short-sighted and opportunistic politicians who prefer to look to the west rather than to the east. In the Nordic countries, we treasure equity in healthcare and we have health for all. In contrast to the US, people don’t die in our countries because they cannot afford to pay for their insulin, hospital stay or insurance.

References

1 UK Government. Landmark UK-US pharmaceuticals deal to safeguard medicines access and drive vital investment for UK patients and businesses. Press release 2025;Dec 1.

2 Cross S, Claxton K, Hill A. Health costs of the UK-US trade deal on pharmaceuticals. BMJ 2026;394:e340588.

3 Abbasi K. £45bn and 300 000 deaths: the UK’s anniversary gift to the US. BMJ 2026;394e100179.

4 Bush D. From Truman’s pension to Trump’s billions - a White House windfall unmatched by any president. BBC 2026;July 2.

5 Gøtzsche PC. In Greenlandic, MAGA means Make America Go Away. Trump’s grandiosity complex, lawlessness and narcissism have united the whole world against America. Gøtzsche’s Perspective 2026;Jan 30.

6 Pandey M. Trump reverses threat of 20% fee on Strait of Hormuz cargo as US prepares to resume Iran ports blockade. BBC 2026;July 13.

7 Gøtzsche PC. Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care. London: Radcliffe Publishing; 2013.

8 Gøtzsche PC. Patients not patents: Drug research and development as a public enterprise. Eur J Clin Invest 2018;48:e12875.

9 Gøtzsche PC. A totally new system is needed for drug research and development. Eur J Clin Invest 2018;48:e12883.

10 Gøtzsche PC. Prescription drugs are the leading cause of death. And psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death. Mad in America 2024;April 16.

11 Ghosh R, Ross JS. US healthcare gap is growing. BMJ 2026;393:e100043.

12 Brownlee S. Overtreated: why too much medicine is making us sicker and poorer. New York: Bloomsbury; 2007.

13 World Health Report 2003 – shaping the future. World Health Organization 2003.

14 Reinhardt UE, Hussey PS, Anderson GF. U.S. health care spending in an international context. Health Aff (Millwood) 2004;23:10-25.

15 Roehr B. Health care in US ranks lowest among developed countries, Commonwealth Fund study shows. BMJ 2008;337:a889.

16 Starfield B, Shi L, Grover A, Macinko J. The effects of specialist supply on populations’ health: assessing the evidence. Health Aff (Millwood) 2005; Jan-Jun;Suppl Web Exclusives:W5-97-W5-107.

17 Wealth but not health in the USA. Lancet 2013;381:177.

18 Nolte E, McKee CM. Measuring the health of nations: updating an earlier analysis. Health Aff (Millwood) 2008;27:58–71.

19 Avendano M, Glymour MM, Banks J, et al. Health disadvantage in US adults aged 50 to 74 years: a comparison of the health of rich and poor Americans with that of Europeans. Am J Public Health 2009;99:540–8.

Little did I know, when I decided to do a Cochrane review of the randomised trials in 1996, that this therapeutic area was dominated by dishonesty, fraud and corruption, which would continue to this day, and that we would be exposed to serious editorial misconduct in Cochrane.

The Cochrane fraud

None of the interventions have any effect,¹ but our results were not welcomed in Cochrane. The editor of the Cochrane Airways Group, Paul Jones, said he needed total certainty that our data extraction was correct, which was surprising. We were a strong team of people, including a lung specialist who had done more trials than anyone else.

Jones asked us to review all the trials again and demanded we go to the group’s office in London to work there while “consulting” the editorial staff, as he called it.

We didn’t need help from people who were less qualified than us, and the extra work was a total waste of time. It didn’t change anything, but delayed publication of our review considerably, which was intended. I learned later that, in the meantime, an application for a trial, similar to many of those we had reviewed but much larger, had been granted public funding amounting to the huge sum of £728,678. If our review had been out, the trial would likely not have been funded.

This institutional corruption² in Cochrane was just the start of our troubles. After our review had been approved for publication, Jones secretly changed our abstract. We incidentally detected this and complained about it.

Some years later, when we updated the review with new trials, Jones changed our abstract again - and again without our knowledge or permission. This was serious editorial misconduct.

We concluded that the interventions “seem to be ineffective and cannot be recommended,”³ which Jones changed to, “There is not enough evidence to show” that the interventions were effective. This was falsely called “Reviewers’ conclusions.” To say that “there is not enough evidence” suggests that if we could have included the large UK trial, we might have shown that the methods worked.

As fraud is any activity that relies on deception to achieve a gain,⁴ Jones committed fraud. We had shown, with narrow confidence intervals, that we could not have missed a worthwhile effect. In our most recent update of the review, from 2008, there is still no trace of an effect, and the large UK trial made no difference to our results whatsoever.⁵ With my statistical background, I knew that this would be the case.

Misleading guidelines

The editor of Allergy had become so tired of his colleagues who turned a blind eye to our review when recommending useless interventions against mites that he, in 2007, asked us to publish it in his journal, which we did.⁶ He was particularly concerned about new asthma guidelines published by the US National Institutes of Health.⁷ An editorial in The Lancet called them “rigorous and evidence-based,” but we explained that this was not correct for the house dust mite recommendations.⁸

The guidelines were 440 pages, the size of two books. An expert panel recommended mattress covers quoting an editorial, a non-systematic review, a before/after study with no control group, a study about rhinitis, and a study we excluded from our review because there were no data for patients who were allergic to mites. Another study was irrelevant because it involved multiple interventions and allergens. The remaining five trials didn’t show an effect of mattress covers. We had 26 trials of mattress encasings in our review and there was no effect.

It was amazing that this deception came from the NIH. The eminences said nothing about our review, which was widely known and had been published in the BMJ nine years earlier.¹

In our Allergy paper, we mentioned a 2008 consensus report written by expert teams from two European academies.¹⁰ It listed impermeable mattress, pillow and quilt covers but forgot to say that they don’t work. JAMA called the guidelines evidence-based, and one of the authors said: “We tried very hard to make these recommendations evidence-based and tried to avoid expert opinion as the basis for recommendations.”¹⁰

I noted in a letter to JAMA that the experts had not tried hard enough because the three references offered in support of their recommendations were irrelevant. I also said that we found that the average effect of the interventions on the peak expiratory flow rate - the most common outcome in asthma trials - was exactly zero, with a very narrow confidence interval.

JAMA refused to publish my letter. Institutional corruption again. My letter made it clear that JAMA had deceived its readers but if JAMA admitted this, they would lose prestige.

Of mites and men

I have experienced that for many doctors - whether they are investigators, clinicians or journal editors - it doesn’t matter that they deceive the patients.¹¹ Patients have been lured into accepting highly expensive super-vacuum cleaners, mattress covers, obsessive cleaning, air filters and throwing out carpets.

I was so appalled over all this that I decided to do a study of narrative reviews to see how deep the fraud was. Inspired by John Steinbeck’s novel, Of mice and men, we called our paper, Of mites and men.¹² We found that 90% of the 70 reviews we included recommended physical interventions, with a highly biased sample of references in support of this. The most quoted trial had only 7 patients per group; its significant result was erroneous; and it was not a clinical outcome.

The recommendations were often based on non-randomised studies, and the most quoted observational study had only 10 patients per group but claimed very positive results. We had 54 randomised trials and 3002 patients in our review.

In 2013, a survey showed that most Italian paediatricians recommend mattress covers, weekly washings at high temperatures, special vacuum cleaners and removing carpets.¹³ The authors presented unwarranted criticism of our review and concluded that the best strategy was to implement all preventive measures. They acknowledged that it is impossible to eradicate mites because they invade houses from the environment,¹⁴ but this admission had no impact on their recommendations.

It was equally bad elsewhere. The text from the famous Mayo Clinic in the US was contradicted by the science:¹⁵ “When you minimize your exposure to dust mites, you can expect fewer or less severe allergic reactions.” The authors recommended even more futile interventions than the Italian doctors, with no references, which means no accountability.

The UK charity Asthma + lung UK also failed miserably.¹⁶ It had similar recommendations as the Mayo Clinic and advised to “open your windows regularly,” which will ensure that more mites will enter the house!

The stupidity peaks in Denmark

When the Appeals Board in 2009 overturned a decision about paying for a mattress cover for one of his patients, Danish paediatrician Jesper Brandt Andersen called the decision grotesque and wrote an article about it in our medical journal.¹⁷

I replied that the Appeals Board based its decision on our Cochrane review after having obtained an opinion from the Board of Health. Strangely, however, the Board continued to recommend mattress covers and said it was in dialogue with “doctors with great expertise in this area.”¹⁸

Splendid. When the best evidence we have doesn’t please people with conflicts of interests, our authorities no longer refer to evidence but to eminence.

In the Board’s 94-page handbook on allergic disorders, there was no reference to our Cochrane review, only to a small Danish trial with 47 patients, which did not find any effect on asthma symptoms. I noted that “doctors with great expertise,” both at home and abroad, after having had 11 years to think about our review, had not changed anything in their recommendations.

My attempt at bringing a little reason into the debate angered Andersen who wrote a new article that was full of untenable arguments and misquotations. He even claimed that our Cochrane review was not evidence-based medicine!¹⁹

I got the point. If you don’t like the results of a randomised trial, just claim it was not a randomised trial.

The allergy “experts” were dishonest, as they must have known that the interventions cannot work. The reduction in allergens that can be obtained is far too small to have any effect, and there are lots of mites in the environment that continue coming into the house.

In 2010, Danish experts on mites said in an interview that encasing mattresses could not work because there are extremely few mites in the mattress compared to the rest of the house.²⁰ One of them noted that wrapping the mattress in allergen-proof mattress covers can best be compared to emptying the Atlantic Ocean with a teaspoon.

However, in the same article, allergy specialist Holger Mosbech recommended mattress covers and tried to argue that there was something wrong with our Cochrane review. This was a logical fallacy because, if he was right, this would not prove that mattress covers are effective. On our official website for patients, Mosbech continued recommending removal of carpets and using mattress covers.²¹

The Board of Health announced that they would look at the evidence again, not because of our Cochrane review, but because the Appeals Board had decided against them.

The Board said that there was no reason to change its advice about using mattress covers and “no need to doubt the Board of Health’s professionalism, or to doubt that the Board uses the best possible evidence.”²²

Monty Python’s Flying Circus would have been proud of our authorities. Instead of a Ministry of Silly Walks,²³ we should perhaps have a Ministry of Silly Advice.

The Board of Health never changed its recommendations. In 2018, they wrote that “improved asthma control may be achieved if house dust mite-reducing measures are used in the bedroom,”²⁴ quoting a 2015 guideline, which said that using allergen-proof mattress covers may reduce the patient’s contact with mite allergens.²⁵ In 2023, the Board claimed that exposure to house dust mites can be significantly reduced.²⁶

What decides what gets used in healthcare can be spelled with five characters: POWER or MONEY, which is about the same. In healthcare, the strength of the evidence has little power and many people are willing to accept even highly improbable claims.¹¹

References

1 Gøtzsche PC, Hammarquist C, Burr M. House dust mite control measures in the management of asthma: meta-analysis. BMJ 1998;317:1105-10.

2 Whitaker R, Cosgrove L. Psychiatry under the influence: institutional corruption, social injury, and prescriptions for reform. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; 2015.

3 Gøtzsche PC. Survival in an overmedicated world: look up the evidence yourself. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2019, page 22.

4 Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. Fraud 101: What Is Fraud? (accessed 3 Jan 2024).

5 Gøtzsche PC, Johansen HK. House dust mite control measures for asthma. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2008;2:CD001187.

6 Gøtzsche PC, Johansen HK. House dust mite control measures for asthma: systematic review. Allergy 2008;63:646–59.

7 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; National Asthma Education and Prevention Program. Expert panel report 3: guidelines for the diagnosis and management of asthma. Washington, DC: US Department of Health, 2007.

8 Gøtzsche PC. Asthma guidelines on house dust mites are not evidence-based. Lancet 2007;370:2100–1 and Gøtzsche PC, Johansen HK. Authors’ reply on ‘House dust mite control measures for asthma’. Allergy 2009;64:190.

9 Bacharier LB, Boner A, Carlsen KH, et al. Diagnosis and treatment of asthma in childhood: a PRACTALL consensus report. Allergy 2008;63:5–34.

10 Mitka M. New evidence-based guidelines focus on treatment of children with asthma. JAMA 2008;299:1122-3.

11 26 Gøtzsche PC. Whistleblower in healthcare (autobiography). Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom 2025 (freely available).

12 Schmidt LM, Gøtzsche PC. Of mites and men: reference bias in narrative review articles; a systematic review. J Fam Pract 2005;54:334–8.

13 Pingitore G, Pinter E. Environmental interventions for mite-induced asthma: a journey between systematic reviews, contrasting evidence and clinical practice. Eur Ann Allergy Clin Immunol 2013;45:74-7.

14 Hallas HE. House-dust mites in our homes are a contamination from outdoor sources. Medical Hypotheses 2010;74:777–9.

15 Dust mite allergy. Mayo Clinic 2021:July 31.

16 Dust mites and asthma. Asthma + Lung UK 2023;Sept 30.

17 Andersen JB. Grotesk sagsbehandling og afgørelse i Ankestyrelsen: Den træffer afgørelser uden specialister og partshøring. Ugeskr Læger 2009;171:3219.

18 Gøtzsche PC. Evidensbaseret medicin: Ankestyrelsen mod Sundhedsstyrelsen om husstøvmider. Ugeskr Læger 2009;171:3727.

19 Andersen JB. Cochraneanalyse om støvmidebetræk er ikke evidensbaseret medicin. Ugeskr Læger 2010;172:651.

20 Hoffmann T. ”Husstøvmider bor ikke i madrassen.” Videnskab.dk 2010;June 28.

21 Mosbech H. Allergi for husstøvmider. Sundhed.dk 2022;June 2.

22 Smith E, Blands J. Svar fra Sundhedsstyrelsen om husstøvmider. Ugeskr Læger 2010;Mar 18.

23 Ministry of Silly Walks.

24 National klinisk retningslinje for non-farmakologisk behandling af astma hos børn og unge: Quick guide. Sundhedsstyrelsen 2018.

25 Non-farmakologisk behandling af astma hos børn og unge. Sundhedsstyrelsen 2015;Sept 23.

26 Astma hos børn. Rationel Farmakoterapi 2023;5;Oct 16.

As an example, the Danish National Board of Health launched the “Six a day” campaign in 2001,¹ which ran for a very long time in the media. It was about eating six pieces of fruit or vegetables every day, e.g. three apples, one large tomato, one large carrot and a banana.

I tried to follow the advice, just for the fun of it, but it was impossible for me.

Your first question when you hear of dietary advice should always be: Was it based on randomised trials? Surely not. It would not be feasible to randomise people to eat six apples or whatever, or none of that, for several years.

So, the evidence must be from observational studies where people decide themselves what to eat. People who eat a lot of fruit and vegetables differ from others in all sorts of ways that could increase their longevity. We call it the healthy volunteer bias.

As the Board of Health said nothing about the basis for its recommendation, I searched the medical literature. Many apples later, a large meta-analysis of 95 studies was published.² It reported that, for fruits and vegetables combined, the risk ratio for all-cause mortality was 0.90 (95% confidence interval 0.87 to 0.93) if the intake was 200 g per day (corresponding to two apples). If you ate eight apples a day, the reduction in mortality was 31%.

The authors concluded that “An estimated 5.6 and 7.8 million premature deaths worldwide in 2013 may be attributable to a fruit and vegetable intake below 500 and 800 g/day, respectively, if the observed associations are causal.”

That’s exactly the point. We have no idea if the observed associations are causal or just bias. The uncertainties in observational studies are far too great to allow us to draw any conclusions about eating apples when the differences in mortality are relatively minor.

Researchers should not scare people with such messages. I wondered how many apples a day it takes to keep the busybodies away. Some of our best epidemiologists have stated that, considering how easy it is to be fooled, a threefold risk increase is only persuasive if the lower limit of the 95% confidence level falls above a threefold increased risk (which means that we are 95% certain that the true risk is increased at least threefold).³

I have always been pretty immune to dietary advice. I eat a varied diet of things I like and avoid becoming overweight. I also drink a lot of coffee. Coffee must be very healthy since it has been subjected to numerous observational studies and has survived these attacks despite the unavoidable biases in such research. For example, if you are stressed, you might drink more coffee and be at greater risk for cardiovascular disease; and more smokers are also found among coffee drinkers. I have never understood why so many Americans ask for decaffeinated coffee when it seems that coffee cannot harm you. In a study of 58,397 deaths, the dose-response relationship was similar for caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee, and already at 2-3 cups a day, the mortality was 18% lower than for non-drinkers.⁴

An another example, people who drink alcohol are different to people who don’t drink alcohol, and comparisons of their risk of dying will therefore inevitably be flawed. It was believed for many years, and confirmed in numerous large‐scale epidemiological studies, systematic reviews, and meta‐analyses, that the relation between alcohol consumption and mortality was a U- or J-shaped curve, so that a little alcohol every day was beneficial.⁵ But the studies were biased. The teetotallers included former drinkers who had quit due to poor health.⁶

The unbearable lightness of observational studies

First, a few indisputable facts.

Randomisation is the only experimental method we have which guarantees that any difference at baseline between two groups is random. This is a prerequisite for the validity of statistical testing. If we randomly assign one group to a cholesterol-lowering drug and the other to a placebo, we may test the hypothesis: What is the chance (the P-value) that, if the drug has no effect on mortality, we see this difference in deaths between the two groups or an even bigger difference?

If P < 0.05, we traditionally say the difference is statistically significant and conclude that the drug changed mortality.

Few doctors and medical researchers know that statistical testing of results derived from observational studies are invalid because we cannot assume that the two groups were comparable at baseline. There are therefore too many statistically significant P-values in observational studies.⁷

Since people who are being compared in observational studies differ in many respects other than the outcome of interest, it is common to adjust for baseline differences with statistical methods. However, it is not possible to adjust reliably for baseline differences. When a statistician used raw data from two large, randomised trials as the basis for observational studies that could have been carried out, he found that the more baseline variables he included in a logistic regression, the further he got from the truth.⁸ He also found that comparisons may sometimes be more biased when the groups appear comparable than when they do not. He warned that no empirical studies have ever shown that adjustment, on average, reduces bias.

An example of the healthy volunteer bias is related to cholesterol lowering. In a trial of a lipid-lowering agent, clofibrate, there was no difference in mortality between drug and placebo.⁹ But among those who took more than 80% of the drug, only 15% died, compared to 25% among the rest (P = 0.0001). This doesn’t prove that the drug works of course, and the same difference was seen in the group that received placebo, 15% versus 28% (P = 5 · 10^–16). Patients who do what they are told are generally healthier than others and therefore have better survival even when the drug is placebo.

Unfortunately, the world is flooded with unreliable observational studies that lead us astray because they are much easier and much cheaper to do than randomised trials. Since observational studies have a poor reputation, those who do them have invented the euphemism ”real-world evidence,”¹⁰ as if such evidence were superior to that derived from randomised trials.

When I did research for my first vaccine book,¹¹ I was shocked to find out that two key US institutions, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) often seriously misinform the public about vaccines, with ill-founded claims about miraculous effects while ignoring important harms.

For vaccines, the CDC excels in case-control studies, which are notoriously unreliable for studying benefits of interventions.¹² After having read what the CDC claimed about flu shots, I distrusted the agency totally. The CDC not only claimed an effect on mortality in healthy people, which has never been shown in randomised trials, they even claimed a much bigger effect than what is mathematically possible, considering the prevalence of influenza and the number of people who die during the winter season.¹¹

The misinformation from the FDA was similar to the misinformation from the CDC: “A lot of the illness and death caused by the influenza virus can be prevented by a yearly influenza vaccine.” This is simply not true.^11,12

What I find most appalling is that the CDC and the FDA does not even warn the readers about the biases in observational studies. The CDC announces colossal effects of vaccination without the slightest hint that these estimates come from highly unreliable research such as case-control studies.^11,12 And when the FDA informed about its use of “real-world evidence” (last updated 2 June 2026), there was nothing about bias.¹³

In a paper that appeared earlier this month in JAMA Intern Med,¹⁴ the supplemental online content, which virtually no one reads, contained data that invalidate the whole study.¹⁵ The authors reported that, at 8 months, the COVID-19 vaccine was associated with a 38% lower risk of COVID-19-associated major adverse cardiovascular events. However, this was the healthy vaccinee bias. All cause mortality curves separated already by day 10, which is impossibly fast.¹⁵

When I was young, the study tutor at the University of Copenhagen advised in a newspaper that it was a good idea to take a year off after school and travel around and see the world because a study had shown that more of those who did this finished their university studies than those who didn’t take a year off.

I think you can see what the problem is with this advice. The healthy student bias. Those who have the resources and confidence to take a year off also have the resources and confidence to finish their studies.

References

1 Gøtzsche PC. Survival in an overmedicated world: look up the evidence yourself. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2019.

2 Aune D, Giovannucci E, Boffetta P, et al. Fruit and vegetable intake and the risk of cardiovascular disease, total cancer and all-cause mortality - a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of prospective studies. Int J Epidemiol 2017;46:1029-56.

3 Taubes G. Epidemiology faces its limits. Science 1995;269:164-9.

4 Park SY, Freedman ND, Haiman CA, et al. Association of coffee consumption with total and cause-specific mortality among nonwhite populations. Ann Intern Med 2017;167:228-35.

5 Miller AP. Still rethinking the J-shaped curve: A commentary on Kember et al., 2024. Alcohol Clin Exp Res 2025;49:503-6.

6 Shaper AG, Wannamethee G, Walker M. Alcohol and mortality in British men: explaining the U-shaped curve. Lancet 1988;2:1267-73.

7 Gøtzsche PC. Believability of relative risks and odds ratios in abstracts: cross-sectional study. BMJ 2006;333:231-4.

8 Deeks JJ, Dinnes J, D’Amico R, et al. Evaluating non-randomised intervention studies. Health Technol Assess 2003;7:1-173.

9 The Coronary Drug Project Research Group. Influence of adherence to treatment and response of cholesterol on mortality in the coronary drug project. N Engl J Med 1980;303:1038-41.

10 Chodankar D. Introduction to real-world evidence studies. Perspect Clin Res 2021;12:171-4.

11 Gøtzsche PC. Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy. New York: Skyhorse; 2021.

12 Gøtzsche PC. CDC, the extended arm of the vaccine industry. Has seriously misinformed the American public. Substack 2026;June 24.

13 CDRH and Real-World Evidence. FDA 2026;June 2.

14 Cai M, Xie Y, Al-Aly Z. 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccine and major adverse cardiovascular events among US veterans. JAMA Intern Med 2026;Jun 15:e261929.

15 Prasad V. A new JAMA IM paper on covid shots contains a preposterous result that invalidates the entire paper. Substack 2026;June 16.

Touting influenza vaccines

The misinformation about influenza vaccines was particularly egregious.¹ I have received many vaccines but have never been vaccinated against influenza, and after having studied the evidence, I am sure I never will. Several of my colleagues who are specialists in infectious diseases and my wife, who is a professor of clinical microbiology, say the same.

After having read CDC’s messages about flu shots, I distrusted the agency totally. The CDC not only claimed an effect on mortality in healthy people, which has never been shown in randomised trials; they claimed a much bigger effect than what is mathematically possible, considering the prevalence of influenza and the number of people who die during the winter season.¹

The CDC website is a treasure trove of misinformation, even worse than what I have seen on drug company websites.

Let’s have a look at how they do their extraordinary stunts.

Read more

As another example, ADHD is called a neurodevelopmental disorder or a cerebral organ dysfunction in psychiatric textbooks even though it is merely a collection of symptoms many of us have.²

This paradigm has failed us badly. In all countries that have been investigated, the rate of disability pensions doubled in just a decade³ while the usage rates for SSRI antidepressants increased markedly,⁴ and after these drugs came on the market, a 35-fold increase in disabled mentally ill children in the US was seen in just 20 years.³

Textbooks and other authoritative texts often claim that psychiatric drugs save lives.^2,5 This has never been documented in rigorous research whereas the randomised trials and carefully controlled observational studies suggest that psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death.⁶

On this background, it is not surprising that the World Health Organization and the United Nations recently called for systematic mental health reform emphasising psychosocial interventions.⁷

Psychiatric diagnoses are often misleading

Another issue with the current paradigm is how psychiatric diagnoses are made. Studies have shown that the diagnostic criteria are arbitrary and rather unscientific, and that the inherent subjectivity leads to large observer variation if several psychiatrists examine the same patients and suggest a diagnosis.²

The diagnostic criteria are so vague and unspecific that many healthy people can get one or more diagnoses if examined accordingly.² The bar for making diagnoses has been lowered, which is one of the reasons why the global number of people labelled with a mental health disorder has doubled from 1990 to 2003.⁸

There is considerable overlap in the criteria for different diagnoses and the adverse effects of psychiatric drugs can be the same as those criteria. Many patients therefore quickly end up with several diagnoses and become psychiatric “career” patients losing many of their best years to psychiatry.^2,5

Psychiatrists call it comorbidity, which it rarely is. It mostly reflects the poor validity of psychiatric diagnoses. For medical diseases, this is not an issue. It is comorbidity, for example, when a patient has both hyperthyroidism and hypertension, as these are two different diseases.

Long-term randomised trials and carefully controlled observational studies have shown that the chance of being cured is greater if the patients do not take psychiatric drugs.^2,3,5 They have also shown that psychotherapy outperforms drug therapy.^2,5

However, guidelines, psychiatric textbooks, state of the art articles and similarly authoritative sources recommend long-term usage of psychiatric drugs for many conditions. They even recommend antidepressants for people at risk of suicide^2,5,9 even though these drugs double suicides.^10,11

Imagine if a cardiologist said to a patient: “You have a heart attack but we have a good drug that will double your risk of dying.” What is standard in psychiatry is unthinkable in other medical specialties.

What should we do instead?

It is very difficult for conscientious clinicians to do what would be best for their patients. Psychiatrists have been fired because they refused to use drugs equally liberally as their peers. This anecdote illustrates the issues:

An 18-year-old student was still grieving after his father hanged himself five years earlier. After he was put on sertraline (Zoloft), he tried to hang himself and a psychiatrist admitted him to a psychiatric hospital and increased the dose of sertraline. When a young psychiatrist noted that antidepressants increase the risk of suicide, the consultant replied that they were aware of this but had to treat depression. If the student committed suicide without being on an antidepressant, they would be questioned why he was not treated.

We need a new paradigm for diagnosing psychiatric patients where we focus on what happened to the patient instead of finding x “faults” with the patient out of y possible according to a diagnostic questionnaire. This way, every patient becomes unique rather than someone who gets one or more labels, chosen from among hundreds of arbitrary and overlapping psychiatric diagnoses.

We also need a new paradigm for treating psychiatric patients that should focus on psychosocial interventions, using drugs as little as possible and helping patients to come off them again.

Psychiatry is not neurology; it is not a medicine of the brain; and the challenge is not a technical one but a human one; it is about relationships, meanings and values.¹

We also need a new paradigm for testing psychiatric drugs.¹² The universal use of short-term placebo-controlled trials with ineffective blinding, subjective outcomes assessed on rating scales with dubious clinical relevance, exposure of patients in the placebo group to drug withdrawal effects, and the reporting of results selectively have produced a literature plagued with misleading results that has resulted in tremendous harm for the patients.

Psychiatrists will have to be brave and resist following guidelines when this would be harmful for a concrete patient. It is allowed to deviate from guidelines if properly motivated in the patient’s file, and in the example above, it should suffice to say that the student will not be treated with an antidepressant because he is suicidal and the drugs double the risk of suicide.¹⁰

The science and the principles of medical ethics tell us that psychiatric drugs should mainly be used in acute situations and only with the patients’ fully informed consent. All laws, which allow forced treatment, violate international conventions and should be abandoned.^2,5

For further reading, some of my colleagues in the Critical Psychiatry Network¹³ and other networks have published excellent books explaining what is wrong with mainstream psychiatry and what we can do about it.¹⁴

In 2018, psychologists, leading activists and psychiatric survivors published the Power Threat Meaning Framework,¹⁵ which is an over-arching structure for identifying patterns in emotional distress, unusual experiences and troubling behaviour, as an alternative to psychiatric diagnosis and classification.

References

1 Bracken P, Thomas P, Timimi S, et al. Psychiatry beyond the current paradigm. Br J Psychiatry 2012;201:430-4.

2 Gøtzsche PC. Critical psychiatry textbook. Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2022 (freely available).

3 Whitaker R. Anatomy of an epidemic, 2nd edition. New York: Broadway Paperbacks; 2015, pages 363 and 8, respectively.

4 Nielsen M, Gøtzsche P. An analysis of psychotropic drug sales. Increasing sales of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are closely related to number of products. Int J Risk Saf Med 2011;23:125–32.

5 Gøtzsche PC. Is psychiatry a crime against humanity? Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom 2024 (freely available).

6 Gøtzsche PC. Prescription drugs are the leading cause of death. And psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death. Mad in America 2024;April 16.

7 Shifting the balance towards social interventions: a call for an overhaul of the mental health system. Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group 2024;May.

8 GBD 2023 Mental Disorder Collaborators. Updated trends in the global prevalence and burden of mental disorders, 1990-2023: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2023. Lancet 2026;407:2040-64.

9 Gøtzsche PC. Killing US war veterans with antidepressants. Substack 2026;May 2.

10 Hengartner MP, Plöderl M. Newer-generation antidepressants and suicide risk in randomized controlled trials: a re-analysis of the FDA database. Psychother Psychosom 2019;88:247-8 and Hengartner MP, Plöderl M. Reply to the Letter to the Editor: “Newer-Generation Antidepressants and Suicide Risk: Thoughts on Hengartner and Plöderl’s Re-Analysis.” Psychother Psychosom 2019;88:373-4.

11 Gøtzsche PC. Observational studies confirm trial results that antidepressants double suicides. Mad in America 2025;Feb 8.

12 Gøtzsche PC. A new paradigm for testing psychiatric drugs is needed. Mad in America 2023;Feb 25.

13 Critical Psychiatry Network.

14 Moncrieff J. The myth of the chemical cure: a critique of psychiatric drug treatment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2007; Moncrieff J. The bitterest pills. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2013; Davies J. Cracked: Why psychiatry is doing more harm than good. London: Icon Books; 2013; Timimi S. Insane medicine: How the mental health industry creates damaging treatment traps and how you can escape them. Seattle: Kindle Direct Publishing; 2021; Read J. A history of madness. In: Read J, Dillon J, eds. Models of madness, 2nd ed. London: Routledge; 2013; Taylor D, Horowitz MA. The Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines – Antidepressants, Benzodiazepines, Gabapentinoids and Z-drugs. Oxford: Wiley; 2024.

15 Johnstone L, Boyle M, Cromby J, et al. The Power Threat Meaning Framework: Towards the identification of patterns in emotional distress, unusual experiences and troubled or troubling behaviour, as an alternative to functional psychiatric diagnosis. Leicester: British Psychological Society; 2018.

This spring, Elsevier removed a published article about vaccines entirely, which was an egregious case of editorial misconduct. In 2021, medical research journalist Neil Z. Miller published a study in Toxicology Reports based on the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database.² Using a 60-day interval after vaccination, he found that 2605 infant deaths between 1990 and 2019 were far from being randomly distributed: 58% clustered within the first 3 days and 78% within 7 days after vaccination (P < 0.00001).

Miller’s research design was appropriate. Looking for clusters of potential drug harms in databases is a well-established method, which provided support to the suspicion that the HPV vaccines in rare cases cause serious neurological harms.³ And he concluded carefully that his findings did not prove that the vaccines caused the deaths but were “highly suggestive of a causal relationship.”

He also addressed the limitations of his study. People may be more likely to report a sudden death to VAERS if it occurs right after vaccination (reporting bias). However, there were large differences in death rates the first three days. Relatively fewer of the deaths were reported on the day of vaccination (17%) and on day 3 (12%), than on day 2 (29%). For Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the percentages were very similar.

Miller noted that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had reported that the median time from vaccination to death was 2 days in 1165 infants who had died suddenly.⁴ Strangely, the CDC was not concerned about this strong signal of harm.

Miller mentioned a confidential report from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) made publicly available by the Italian Court, which showed that 63% of 67 infant deaths that occurred within 20 days after a hexavalent vaccine had occurred within the first 3 days. Another confidential report by GSK submitted to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) showed that 53% of the deaths occurred within the first 3 days after a hexavalent vaccine and 82% within the first week.

When discussing why deaths clustered during the first three days, particularly on day 2, Miler referred to theories about the role of inflammatory cytokines as neuromodulators in the infant medulla leading to impeded respiration and quoted studies showing it takes 1-2 days for the cytokines to reach peak levels.

Miller’s discussion section is very long, 8 pages, and I have several reservations. It seems to me that he cherry-picked the references, which include an unpublished lecture and book chapter I could not retrieve. Others are unconvincing. Miller also left out some large studies that did not find an association between vaccination and infant mortality. However, his methods and his result, a clustering of deaths, are convincing.

To put Miller’s findings in proper perspective, we need systematic reviews of the randomised trials, including those that have compared early with late vaccination, because his own research has shown that the death risk is smaller in older children.⁵ Such trials exist.

Moreover, we need a systematic review of observational studies, with the various biases in such research being addressed in the protocol and carefully assessed in the review.

The removal of the published paper

In December 2025, Lawrence H. Lash, the editor of Toxicology Reports, wrote to Miller about concerns from multiple parties about “potential research errors and misleading statements about vaccine efficacy. The allegations are listed on PubPeer and on another science blog: https://pubpeer.com/publications/C02A9C1F937150E44015877641F4F9

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1455831798160764929.html.“

It was not multiple parties. It was just one anonymous person whom I identified from other sources: Magdalen Rose Wind-Mozley from England.

PubPeer is nicknamed PubSmear because professional troublemakers of little of no scientific repute use the platform - often anonymously - to harass scientists whose results they don’t like. Lash’s PubPeer reference includes his second link, which leads to Wind-Mozley’s attacks on Miller’s paper on X under the alias @Rosewind2007.

Clearly, any scientific issues should have been dealt with in letters to the editor in Toxicology Reports, as is usual practice. But this didn’t happen and the correspondence between the journal and Miller and the criticism by Wind-Mozley are so extraordinary that I have uploaded them for the historical record.

Emails Regarding The Removal Of Miller's Paper

156KB ∙ PDF file

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Download

The Pubpeer Criticism Raised By An Influencer

791KB ∙ PDF file

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Wind-Mozley’s views on vaccines are extreme and often go against the evidence, and her manners towards people who disagree with her are so rude and aggressive that I needed to block her on my X account long ago.

On X, she called for Miller’s paper to be retracted. A few of her comments are relevant but most are not and some are plain wrong. She was true to her usual style:

I cannot see that this is stupid but that’s perhaps because I am not a child. There is nothing wrong with Miller’s cluster analysis, but Wind-Mozley continues making inexcusable errors:

Honestly: how the hell did this get published?

“There are 130 official ways for an infant to die, as categorized in the ICD, and one unofficial way for an infant to expire: from a fatal reaction to vaccines.”

This is beyond wrong.

This is just diabolical.

It is not wrong. Miller explained in his article that the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) dropped vaccination as an official cause of death in 1979. The devil is not Miller but Wind-Mozley. Just below “diabolical,” Wind-Mozley shows her extreme bias related to vaccines with the hashtag, #VaccinesWork, and a photo of a mug with “Vaccines work:”

For drugs, including vaccines, it is not enough to say that they work. This is primitive industry propaganda. In my first vaccine book, I explain on the first page:⁶

“We must evaluate carefully each vaccine, one by one, assessing the balance between its benefits and harms, just as we do for other drugs, and then form an opinion about whether we think the vaccine is worth getting or recommending to other people ... All drugs have harms, and if your risk of contracting an infection is very low, it might not be worthwhile to run the risk of getting seriously harmed by the vaccine, even if this risk is also very low … This is straightforward and uncontroversial, but one reason why vaccines may confuse people is that they have become a battlefield. There are fundamentalists on both sides of the debate who ignore the evidence or manipulate it to further their agendas.”

In his detailed response to Lash, Miller concluded that the criticism raised against his paper does not meet established criteria for retraction under COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics or ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors). I agree totally.

However, in February 2026, Miller was told that the editor would remove his paper entirely, for no one to see, because the concerns raised as well as Miller’s response affected the article’s integrity and findings and constituted potentially unsafe research for medical practice. This message was written by Francesco Papi, PhD, Publishing Ethics Expert at Elsevier. It mentioned “potential research errors and methodological flaws.”

This was abhorrent. There was no explanation about what Miller should have done wrong, and he didn’t do anything wrong in relation to what he set out to study: If there was a clustering of the deaths.

Miller requested in his appeal that the proposed removal be withdrawn and that any remaining concerns be addressed through proportionate editorial mechanisms consistent with publication ethics standards. He also sent his concerns to COPE.

He noted that his article could not be potentially unsafe for medical practice because it did not provide clinical guidance or proposed policy changes. It raised a hypothesis and called for further studies. He also explained why it did not meet Elsevier’s withdrawal criteria. Removal is a measure of last resort and not an appropriate response to interpretive disagreement, which should be addressed in a scientific debate.

Miller asked which specific statements or analyses that were deemed potentially unsafe for medical practice and by which mechanisms; which specific Elsevier or COPE criteria for removal that were invoked; and which specific methodological flaws that could affect the article’s integrity and findings.

Lash replied that the decision to retract the paper was based on careful review and consultation with experts and repeated that the paper posed potential risks to public health and should not be allowed to stand. According to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, this reply to Miller’s relevant questions was bullshit, which he considers comes close to lying.⁷ It seems to me that the postulated risk is not for the patients but for the establishment.

COPE replied to Miller that their review is limited to the process followed by the journal and that editorial decisions are beyond their remit. They nonetheless repeated the bullshit claiming that the journal gave the concerns due consideration; that the editor determined that the conclusions were not supported and that this undermined the standing of the publication; and that the paper could have a serious health risk to the general public or the environment. Excuse me, but I come to think of Stalin’s show trials. No explanations. Just shoot the guy.

Next, Miller informed the journal and Elsevier that, if they removed his article, they should not justify this by claims of methodological flaws affecting the integrity or findings of the research, as he had refuted such assertions, and that, if it was because of alleged potential risks to public health or to medical practice, the rationale for this should be provided.

Francesco Papi from Elsevier couldn’t care less. He replied that “The journal’s investigation has identified methodological flaws and research errors, including misinterpretation and biased selection and analysis of data. Because the data and findings could be harmful if applied in clinical practice, the Editor has determined that removal of the article is warranted. This decision is final, and we will not engage further on this matter.”

My comments

Miller’s demonstration of a clustering of infant deaths just after a vaccination is important information, which the CDC also published.⁴ But he became the victim of outrageous editorial and publisher misconduct. And not only him. We are all victims of scientific censorship. It impedes the free flow of ideas and results, to the detriment of science and to our patients.

I find it horrific when some people decide what others are entitled to know. This happens every day but is a constant threat to science and democracy, and it paves the way to dictatorships and theocracies. I fail to understand that some people are so arrogant that they give themselves such powers. It shows a deep disrespect for fellow citizens.

Elsevier removed the article entirely:

The “View PDF” at the top does not lead to the article, but to a mendacious removal notice.⁸ It claimed that “readers” (there was only one) had raised concerns about potential research errors and methodological flaws. And that, after an investigation, the journal had identified serious methodological flaws in the use of VAERS data to infer a correlation between vaccination and SIDS.

It was as bad as it gets. No errors were identified and the biases in research using VAERS data are well known and were well accounted for in Miller’s article. The next bit in the removal notice was also mendacious: “Given the inherent limitations of passive reporting systems, including the expected temporal clustering of events independent of causality, the conclusions presented in the article are not supported by the methodology employed.” Miller’s conclusions were appropriate. The Editor-in-Chief ended his notice by talking about the potential implications for medical practice, which is also totally misleading. In essence, what the editor said is that scientific inquiry is a public health hazard.

The PubMed record does not say that the article has been removed or retracted² and there is a link to the full article in PubMed Central, with no warning about the removal.

More about the influencer, Wind-Mozley

Magdalen Rose Wind-Mozley is a Master of Science but her education is weird: a bachelor in zoology and a master’s in forensic science. She is not a scientist but an influencer. She only has two publications. One is a 2017 letter in a rather unknown journal, NPJ Vaccines, where she accused my research group of being anti-vaxxers already in the title: “Inadvisable anti-vaccination sentiment: Human Papilloma Virus immunisation falsely under the microscope.”⁹

She denigrated our research about the harms of the HPV vaccines and criticised me for using my centre’s letterhead when I wrote a complaint to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) about their mishandling of the suspicion of serious neurological harms raised by Denmark. I did not have any other letterheads.

She praised the EMA for its work, which failed to find a causal link between HPV vaccines and serious neurological harms. I later published an article about EMA’s mishandling of its investigation¹⁰ and documented that EMA committed scientific misconduct.^11,12

Denmark’s concerns were partly based on three excellent studies by Doctor Louise Brinth from the Danish Syncope Centre,¹¹ which Wind-Mozley disdainfully called poor-quality studies.

We rebutted her letter but were exposed to serious censorship by the journal’s owner, Springer, that tried to prevent its publication. It took 3 years before it came out and this was only after we had threatened Springer with litigation.^11,12

The title of our letter is telling: “Suspicions of possible vaccine harms must be scrutinised openly and independently to ensure confidence.”¹³ We warned that if well-founded concerns about possible harms cannot be discussed openly for fear of harassment, this would be worrying not only for vaccines but for healthcare in general.

Wind-Mozley’s other letter was a reply to us, with additional misleading claims.¹⁴ She claimed we had been wrong in our HPV vaccine research by referring to another influencer, a woman who has hated me intensely ever since I published a review about mammography screening in 2001 that showed that it doesn’t save lives (total mortality and total cancer mortality including breast cancer mortality are not reduced) and is harmful because of overdiagnosis.¹⁵ Wind-Mozley also referred to another unwarranted criticism, which included the impossibility that a death disappeared when the follow-up was extended!

More Springer censorship

In 2019, our systematic review of the clinical study reports we had obtained from the EMA of the HPV vaccines was accepted for publication in Systematic Reviews, owned by Springer. However, a year later, it had still not been published, although the journal promises publication within 20 days of acceptance.^11,12

We had shown in exploratory analyses that the HPV vaccines increased serious nervous system disorders significantly. But the journal committed editorial misconduct. Our email correspondence with the journal takes up 66 pages, and we received 20 apologies and a variety of odd, contradictory, and implausible reasons for why our paper had not been published.⁶

When we warned Springer that we would involve our lawyers if Springer failed to publish our review within the next two weeks, they published it with record speed.¹⁶

In 2019, I became an expert witness in a lawsuit against Merck related to its HPV vaccine, Gardasil. I read 112,452 pages of confidential study reports and documented the multitude of ways in which Merck committed fraud in its trials, hiding cases of serious neurological harms:¹¹

In June 2026, Merck settled over 200 lawsuits at an alleged cost of over $50 million.¹² Based on my extensive investigations, I have no doubt that HPV vaccines in rare cases can cause serious neurological harms that can be irreversible and incapacitating, and that Merck committed fraud by deliberately hiding these harms from public view. I also have no doubt that Merck’s aluminium adjuvant causes harm and that virtually all Merck’s so-called placebo-controlled trials were unethical because the “placebo” group was exposed to a harmful substance, the aluminium adjuvant, which the patients were not informed about.

Other cases of censorship related to vaccines

I have a clear feeling that censorship is worst in relation to vaccines and I know some of the victims personally.

In Spain, farmers had observed serious behavioural changes in sheep vaccinated against blue-tongue disease, which Spanish researchers confirmed in an experimental study in 2013.¹⁶

Lluís Luján did a meticulously study that showed that, compared to placebo, sheep injected repeatedly with the aluminium oxyhydroxide adjuvant or the vaccine had fewer affiliative interactions whereas they had increases in aggressive interactions, stereotypies, excitatory behaviour, and compulsive eating.

The study was published online in Pharmacological Research in 2018 but was retracted by the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Emilio Clementi, and is no longer on the journal’s website.

Clementi wrote to Lluís that he had “received serious concerns from the readership,” which he detailed without revealing the sources, which proved to be only one person, likely a troll financed by a vaccine manufacturer. Sounds familiar, right?

The aluminium oxyhydroxide adjuvant is used in the HPV vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline, and when the company did trials of its vaccine, Cervarix, they admitted that it had affected the nervous system but refused to disclose what that meant.¹²

Danish vaccine researchers Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn have done numerous studies that have shown that non-live vaccines tend to increase total mortality whereas live attenuated vaccines. e.g. the measles vaccine, decrease total mortality more than predicted from their specific effect.¹⁷

Vaccine programmes have not yet taken these results into account, including that it is best to end with a live vaccine. Peter started this research decades ago and his results are so groundbreaking that they are on the list of milestones in Nature,¹⁸ which starts with the discovery of the smallpox vaccine.

An influencer, Charlotte Strøm, who is a doctor but works as a journalist, succeeded to raise doubts about their research in the Danish media, which went amok and misrepresented the issues, as they always do when they smell blood from highly esteemed medical researchers.

Yet again, the criticism was invalid. It is a long story of censorship that still needs to be told. Christine told some of it on LinkedIn, in Danish.¹⁹

In July 2022, Christine uploaded a video with Peter on YouTube about his research in Africa.¹ It was mostly about the hugely beneficial non-specific effects of the measles vaccine, but Peter also mentioned his interactions with the WHO about the high-titre measles vaccine, which he showed increased mortality in girls. The vaccine was later withdrawn.

Christine discovered that YouTube had removed the video due to “inappropriate content.”¹ She appealed but YouTube didn’t care. They sent a robotic message the next day claiming they had carefully reviewed the content.

When she wrote about her frustrations, she was contacted by Danish TV2. Now, all of a sudden, YouTube uploaded her video again but refused to tell her why even though, according to YouTube’s guidelines, it is not possible to overturn a rejected appeal. Christine said to TV2 that Google’s censorship is toxic because it increases the distrust in the authorities and vaccine hesitancy.²⁰

In 2023, I interviewed Christine about vaccines for our Broken Medical Science film and interview channel.²¹ We discussed non-specific beneficial and harmful effects of vaccines and why the COVID-19 vaccines were overused, e.g. in children. On a Sunday, in March 2024, my filmmaker tested YouTube’s censorship by uploading the interview. It took YouTube less than an hour to remove it: “Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our medical misinformation policy.”

We appealed and YouTube’s robot replied: “We reviewed your content carefully and have confirmed that it violates our medical misinformation policy.” It took YouTube less than an hour to evaluate the video carefully, which is impressive, as it lasts 54 minutes.

The video had been online on our own website for six months. We wondered why social media wanted to prevent scientific debate about the benefits and harms of vaccines. Censorship creates distrust in science.

In March 2019, I opened the Institute for Scientific Freedom in Copenhagen and held a symposium about scientific freedom. Morten Hjertholm from Storyboard Productions filmed the lectures for free, as he found our initiative important, and uploaded them on YouTube.²²

Two and a half years later, YouTube removed Peter Aaby’s lecture, “Most of you think we know what our vaccines are doing - we don’t.” YouTube explained that it “doesn’t allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and by the World Health Organization (WHO).”

There were several links in YouTube’s message but none where it was most needed: “Appeal here.”

We appealed and our complaint was rejected even though we explained that there was no misinformation whatsoever in Peter’s lecture. We also noted that, historically, challenging authorities has been immensely beneficial for mankind and for making scientific progress, and that this is at the heart of science.

The next day, YouTube informed Morten that they had reviewed the content carefully - I wonder if this is ever true - and had confirmed that it violated their medical misinformation policy: “It’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all.”

This was bizarre. Censoring scientifically valid and important information about vaccines does not make the world a “safe place for all;” it makes the world a less safe place.

Someone, an influencer I guess, saw the 2.5-year-old video and complained to YouTube, which reacted robotically. I uploaded the video on my homepage²³ and published a summary of Peter’s lecture explaining why he disagrees with WHO’s view on the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) vaccine.²³ Which I also do. I was asked to do an expert report and found that Peter’s research is more reliable than that by the WHO expert group.²⁴

Conclusions

It is disgraceful that an influencer who is a scientific nobody succeeded to have Miller’s article removed, with mendacious reasons offered by the journal.

The aim of censorship is to reduce misinformation but it increases it because scientists will, for fear of harassment, tend to say what falls in line with current government policy. The history of medicine is one long record of people suffering because established truths were wrong and dissenters were suppressed, which my own career illustrates.¹

We don’t want social media or medical journals to direct us to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth, which are, for example, the websites of governments, the WHO, the CDC or the FDA.

We, the scientists, abhor censorship in medical journals, newspapers, and other media, which is why I named the institute I established in 2019, the Institute for Scientific Freedom.

References

1 Gøtzsche PC. Whistleblower in healthcare (autobiography). Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom 2025 (freely available).

2 Miller NZ. Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990-2019 and review of the medical literature. Toxicol Rep 2021;8:1324-35.

3 Chandler RE, Juhlin K, Fransson J, et al. Current safety concerns with human papillomavirus vaccine: a cluster analysis of reports in VigiBase (R). Drug Saf 2016;40:81–90.

4 Moro PL, Arana J, Cano M, et al. Deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, United States, 1997-2013. Clin Infect Dis 2015;61:980-7.

5 Goldman GS, Miller NZ. Relative trends in hospitalizations and mortality among infants by the number of vaccine doses and age, based on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), 1990-2010. Hum Exp Toxicol 2012;31:1012-21.

6 Gøtzsche PC. Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy. New York: Skyhorse; 2021.

7 Frankfurt HG. On bullshit. New Jersey: Princeton University Press; 2005.

8 REMOVED: Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature. Elsevier’s retraction notice, undated.

9 Head MG, Wind-Mozley M, Flegg PJ. Inadvisable anti-vaccination sentiment: Human Papilloma Virus immunisation falsely under the microscope. NPJ Vaccines 2017;2:6.

10 Gøtzsche PC, Jørgensen KJ. EMA’s mishandling of an investigation into suspected serious neurological harms of HPV vaccines. BMJ Evid Based Med 2022;27:7-10.

11 Gøtzsche PC. How Merck and drug regulators hid serious harms of the HPV vaccines. New York: Skyhorse; 2025.

12 Gøtzsche PC. Merck settles lawsuits about serious neurological harms of Gardasil, its HPV vaccine. The European Medicines Agency committed scientific misconduct, too. Substack 2026;June 10.

13 Jørgensen KJ, Auken M, Brinth L, Chandler R, Gøtzsche PC, Jefferson T. Suspicions of possible vaccine harms must be scrutinised openly and independently to ensure confidence. npj Vaccines 2020;5:55.

14 Head MG, Wind-Mozley M, Flegg PJ. Reply: Suspicions of possible vaccine harms must be scrutinised openly and independently to ensure confidence. NPJ Vaccines 2020;5(1):56.

15 Olsen O, Gøtzsche PC. Cochrane review on screening for breast cancer with mammography. Lancet 2001;358:1340-2.

16 Jørgensen L, Gøtzsche PC, Jefferson T. Benefits and harms of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines: systematic review with meta-analyses of trial data from clinical study reports. Syst Rev 2020;9:43.

17 Benn CS, Fisker AB, Aaby P (eds.). Bandim Health Project 1978 – 2018: forty years of contradicting conventional wisdom. 2018.

18 Flemming A. Nature milestones in vaccines. Nature 2020;Sept 28.

19 Christine Stabell Benn. LinkedIn 2025;Dec.

20 Moestrup JHR. Youtube fjernede dansk professors vaccinevideo – så henvendte TV 2 sig, og nu er den tilbage. TV2 2022;July 25.

21 Episode 03: Vaccines, a complicated area. Some decrease total mortality, some increase it, and COVID-19 vaccines are overused. Interview with Christine Stabell Benn. Broken Medical Science 2023;Oct 1

22 Opening symposium for the Institute for Scientific Freedom. 2019;March 9.

23 Gøtzsche PC. YouTube’s removal of a lecture on the effects of vaccines on mortality constitutes horrible censorship. Institute for Scientific Freedom 2021;Nov 17.

24 Gøtzsche PC. Expert Report. Effect of DTP Vaccines on Mortality in Children in Low-Income Countries

I have found that Grok, which is provided by X, is far better than other sources. Grok tells you, with references that are spot on, that antidepressants can contribute to homicide in rare cases and it also explains what the mechanisms of action are: “akathisia (severe inner restlessness), agitation, mania, emotional blunting, or disinhibition.”

With Google, you will be told that that the issue is controversial, with some studies speaking for and some against. This is not illuminating. It is what we could say about most issues in healthcare. A major reason for this is the doubt industry.¹ When robust research has shown that a product is dangerous, numerous substandard studies are produced saying the opposite, which confuse the public because – as journalists will tell you – researchers disagree.

If we compare the tobacco and the drug industries, we’ll find that they have much in common. The morally repugnant disregard for human lives is the norm. The tobacco companies were proud when they increased sales in vulnerable low-income and middle-income countries, and without a trace of irony or shame, Imperial Tobacco’s management team reported to investors in 2011 that the UK-based company won a Gold Award rating in a corporate responsibility index. The tobacco companies saw “many opportunities for us to develop our business,” which The Lancet described as “selling, addicting, and killing, surely the most cruel and corrupt business model human beings could have invented.”²

This is a pretty accurate description of what drug companies do with psychiatric drugs. Selling, addicting, and killing.

As I wrote on the first page in my book about organized crime,³ tobacco executives know they are peddling death and so do drug company executives. It is no longer possible to deny the fact that tobacco and psychiatric drugs are major killers, but the drug industry has done surprisingly well in hiding this. With its paid lackeys among psychiatrists, they have hidden that antidepressants cause dependence, just as all the chief tobacco executives testified at a US Congressional hearing in 1994 that nicotine isn’t addictive, although they had known for decades that this was a lie.

Lundbeck has claimed that antidepressants protect against suicide.⁴ And Eli Lilly has said that “There is no credible evidence that establishes a causal link between Prozac and violent or suicidal behavior. There is, to the contrary, scientific evidence showing that Prozac and medicines like it actually protect against such behaviors.”⁵

This is perverse since antidepressants cause suicide. It makes Lundbeck and Eli Lilly even worse than tobacco companies, which never claimed that cigarettes protect against lung cancer.

“Doubt is our product,”⁶ a tobacco executive once said, and this smokescreen always works. Create a lot of paid noise and confuse people into disbelieving the rigorous studies and believing the noise instead.

The doubt industry is very effective at distracting people into ignoring the harms of their products. The industry buys time while people continue to die.

The drug companies knew how dangerous their drugs were before they marketed them. Eli Lilly knew that fluoxetine could cause a strange, agitated state of mind with unbearable rage, delusions, and disassociation, or an unstoppable urge to commit suicide or murder.⁷

In 2006, David Healy reported that both clinical trial data and pharmacovigilance data suggest that antidepressants can cause violence and noted that the mechanisms of action include akathisia, emotional disinhibition, emotional blunting, and manic or psychotic reactions to treatment.⁸

When my research group used FDA-defined precursors to suicide and violence, we found that antidepressants doubled the risk of such harms in adult healthy volunteers compared to placebo.⁹

When David and I examined the two clinical study reports Eli Lilly had submitted to drug regulators to get fluoxetine approved for depression in children, we found highly disturbing results that do not appear anywhere in the published literature.¹⁰

In the biggest trial, six of 109 children dropped out of the study while receiving fluoxetine and one of 110 while receiving placebo. In Lilly’s view, they dropped out for nonserious psychiatric reasons, but this was not the case. They quit fluoxetine for exactly those reasons that increase the risk of suicide and violence: agitation, elevated mood coded as euphoria, physical aggression coded as hostility, hyperactivity coded as hyperkinesia, mania, and behavioral disinhibition coded as personality disorder.

According to the narratives, these patients were more severely affected than Lilly’s tables suggested. The agitation, for example, was severe, and additional events included irritability, fatigue, decreased concentration, insomnia, anger, hearing voices, racing thoughts, mood swings and temper tantrums, which suggested drug induced psychosis and possibly akathisia.

A cohort study from Finland found that homicide was related to the use of antidepressants, risk ratio 1.31 (95% confidence interval 1.04 to 1.65; P = 0.02), and benzodiazepines, risk ratio 1.45 (1.17 to 1.81; P = 0.001), for current use versus no current use.¹¹ Such studies underestimate the risk of violence because people who have come off their drugs might suffer from akathisia and commit homicide for this reason but would be counted as non-users.

The organized professional denial is shocking considering the many school shootings and other mass murders where the killers were on depression drugs.¹² When one of the teenage shooters in the Columbine High School massacre was found to have taken a depression pill, the American Psychiatric Association denounced the notion that there could be a causal relation and added that undiagnosed and untreated mental illness exacts a heavy toll on those who suffer from these disorders.¹³ This sickening marketing-speak is also what the drug industry propagates. The other murderer had also taken depression pills.

The Germanwings pilot who took a whole plane-load of passengers with him when he committed suicide in the Alps, and the Belgian bus driver who killed many children by driving his bus into a mountain wall, were on a depression pill.¹⁴

The authorities routinely hide which drugs the killers were on in order not to raise concerns about the pills, but they cannot hide the adverse events reports they have received.

Read more

A colleague who wishes to remain anonymous to avoid being persecuted by her former boss told me this story.

During my first meeting with a high-ranked doctor, he told me without mincing words about the modus operandi of his lab: Publications come first and science second because publications bring in grants.

Being a naive and newly baked postdoc, I had no idea what he meant until he asked me to falsify the data. He wanted to know whether a statin drug from Merck could be effective for aortic aneurysm. We used a well-known animal model of aneurysm induction. The mice were fed a high fat diet, and one group received a statin, the other a placebo.

At the end of the experiment, there were more dead mice in the statin group. My boss told me to ignore the dead mice because it would not look good for the drug.

I consulted with the most senior person in the lab who was moving on to a different position and she understood why I was upset. I ended up leaving the lab, too.

Unless there is a documentary trail of falsification, people like him can just keep on committing fraud without consequences. If I had evidence, I would speak out.

In my freely available autobiography, I describe an incident where I also came under pressure to violate the scientific rules, which happened when I was a junior doctor, only a couple of years after my graduation.

To avoid bias during data analysis and the writing of manuscripts for clinical trials, I had introduced blinding during curation and analysis of the data, and I even wrote the manuscripts blindly. This was so unique that I was invited to give a lecture about it, with all costs paid, at the annual meeting for the Society of Clinical Trials in Houston in 1994, and I published an article about my methods and practical experiences with them.

According to my procedure, I wrote two versions of the manuscript. It was particularly interesting to write two discussion sections, not knowing what was A and B, and I required of my co-authors that they approve both versions before we broke the blinding.

Because of my profound knowledge of statistics and trial methodology, I had been invited to be a co-author when colleagues at the Department of Infectious Diseases at Rigshospitalet in Denmark planned a short-term, placebo-controlled pilot study of the effect of fusidic acid – an antibiotic - in African AIDS patients.

I did the data analysis, and there was a mortality difference. The P-value was 0.06 with Fisher’s exact test and 0.02 in a survival analysis, week by week. Despite the randomisation, there was a marked difference in weight at baseline, which was important because weight was strongly correlated with survival. Adjusting for weight yielded a P-value of 0.13.

This was an exciting moment, with P-values spanning from 0.02 to 0.13. In such situations, many researchers let their bias determine what they choose to report and how.

In vitro studies had suggested that the drug had an effect against HIV. Had we shown that this effect could be replicated in patients? Or did the drug have a deleterious effect on weak AIDS patients that killed some of them? Or didn’t the drug do anything?

During the discussions of the two blinded manuscripts, my co-authors suggested breaking the code to guide the analysis, but I refused. Under the null hypothesis of no difference in effect between drug and placebo, any decision taken during data analysis should be independent of the treatment code. Furthermore, I had specified the principle of blinding during data analysis and writing of the manuscript in the trial protocol.

After both manuscripts had been accepted by my co-authors and the code was broken, I was again put under pressure to make statistical adjustments, for other imbalances than weight, but now my colleagues knew in what direction any adjustment would change the result. When I refused, one of my co-authors produced a new manuscript with new analyses, some of which were not only unwarranted but illegitimate, e.g. he had excluded some deaths that occurred after randomisation, which is not allowed.

There were heated disputes over this. I needed to tell my co-authors that if they went ahead with their inappropriate analyses, I would withdraw as author and would publish a letter to the editor where they published the trial explaining that they had violated the protocol. This calmed them down and convinced them to adhere to our protocol.

The end of the story was that a second, larger study failed to confirm the nonsignificant tendency in the pilot trial. This trial was not published.

I was not involved with the larger study. I would have insisted that the results should be published. Not to publish negative results is unethical and scientific misconduct. And yet, we cannot even know if what gets published is truthful. What really happens in a trial is often not reflected in what is published, but the readers rarely have any chance to investigate if the authors committed fraud, which often happens, even in our most prestigious medical journals.

I surely ran a risk. I went directly against my professor, as it was his idea that the drug might work against AIDS. When I told the story to colleagues, they were shocked that I dared do what I did, as professors can ruin careers. Many people who have made it to the top have psychopathic traits but, in this case, the professor was an honourable person and he appreciated my expertise. I could not know if my stubbornness would have made him my enemy.

Healthcare is hugely corrupted by industry money and too many doctors have a price at which they can be bought. I have never considered truth negotiable. Together with freedom of speech, it is the most precious asset we have.

I have never feared for the consequences for myself when I stood my ground. If we don’t react and stop psychopaths, we will go from bad to worse. It is not an option to stay quiet when we see fraud or injustice.

Desmond Tutu, Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize Winner from South Africa, said: ”If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” He also said: “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

The assistant coroner highlighted the risks of future child deaths in his “Prevention of future deaths” report sent to the Department of Health and Social Care. Uniquely in surgical practice, when ritual, non-therapeutic circumcision is performed by lay practitioners, it is exempt from regulatory oversight.

It is therefore not possible to know who is operating, how many children are being operated on, where the operations are taking place and under what circumstances, or how many children suffer short or long-term harms of the operation. Action is only taken when something goes seriously wrong.

At least seven circumcision-related deaths have been recorded in the UK over the past few years.

In 2010, midwife Grace Adeleye used a pair of scissors to amputate the healthy foreskin from a baby, Goodluck Caubergs. The nurse and Goodluck’s parents were from Nigeria, where circumcision of newborns is the tradition for Christian families. The jury was told that Adeleye had done “more than 1,000” circumcisions. Tragically, Goodluck did not live up to his name. He bled to death.

In 2012, Angelo Ofori-Mintah was mortally wounded by rabbi Mordechai Cohen. This baby also bled to death.

The midwife was convicted of manslaughter and a judge ordered her to serve 21 months in jail, suspended for 24 months. She was also given a six-month overnight curfew and a 12-month supervision order.

In contrast, the rabbi was reassured by the deputy coroner that he was “entirely blameless” for what she described as “a tragic accident, an unforeseen consequence of the surgical procedure.”

Convictions in 2025 and ignored calls for regulation

In 2025, two men were given custodial sentences for causing serious harm to children related to community circumcision procedures including cruelty by means of lack of appropriate anaesthesia.

Mohammed Alazawi had pretended to unsuspecting parents that he was a trained doctor. He used a bogus document attributed to Istiklal Hospital in Jordan that stated he was trained in circumcision. He was convicted of 40 offences which included multiple counts of fraud, wounding with intent, administering and supplying prescription only medicines, and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. He was sentenced to nine years imprisonment.

Mohammad Siddiqui had previously worked as an NHS paediatric surgeon until his license to practice medicine was revoked in 2015 by the General Medical Council because he was found to have performed unsafe community circumcision operations. Absurdly, his removal from the medical register allowed him to continue performing community circumcisions as a lay person, without any oversight or regulation. He was jailed for five years and seven months after admitting he caused “painful cruelty to children” by running a mobile circumcision service, ignoring basic hygiene.

Both judges called for urgent regulation of the practice but nothing happened and the political statements were appalling.

The Government stated that “The Ministry of Justice has no responsibility for non-therapeutic male circumcision or its regulation.” In response to another parliamentary question about what action the Government might take, the Undersecretary of State for Patient Safety, Baroness Merron said that “The Government has no plans to make changes to the regulatory framework for unanaesthetised non-therapeutic circumcision of boys.” Baroness Merron served as chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews between 2014 and 2021.

Human rights violations

The UK government’s passivity is a violation of basic human rights. In another article, I explained why ritual circumcision of boys must be banned. One reason is that, ethically, we cannot defend banning circumcision of girls while allowing circumcision of boys.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is a legally binding agreement setting out the rights of every child, regardless of their race, religion or abilities. It is clear from Article 24, paragraph 3, that you must not cause suffering to children: “States Parties shall take all effective and appropriate measures with a view to abolishing traditional practices prejudicial to the health of children.”

Tattooing is illegal in Denmark before the child is 18 years old. Therefore, circumcision should also be banned until children reach adulthood and can make their own decisions. Antony Lempert, a general practitioner whose article I quote, was born and raised within a Jewish family and community where circumcision is widely practiced, and he agrees with me that circumcision should only be undertaken on consenting adults.

The foreskin has an important function. It protects the glans penis, which, after circumcision, becomes exposed to air, friction from underwear, and drying. Over time, the mucosa undergoes keratinization, which turns the moist, highly sensitive mucosal surface into something more like dry external skin.

I find it very odd that religious communities believe that God created man in his image and that they then nonetheless routinely alter what they think a perfect God created. It looks blasphemous to me.

Whether performed on girls or on boys, genital mutilation is barbarism. We must stop it. Now.

It was one of the most bizarre events I have experienced.² A Jewish doctor, Henri Goldstein, and a Muslim doctor, Kamran Shah, agreed that circumcision was a very important part of their community. Others pointed out that it is a strange entry ticket to a community that you must cut something off yourself to join.

Goldstein mentioned that 5-10% of Jews are not circumcised. I cannot imagine that they would not be welcome in the community and how would people know? Jews hardly have registers of circumcised people, and if Jewish men show up at a party or at the synagogue, there would not be a doorman asking them to pull down their pants to see if they were entitled to participate in the community.

A Jewish mom regretted having her son, Leo Milgrom, circumcised, and when he grew up, he felt he didn’t belong to the community. He mentioned that some Jews don’t circumcise their boys but use another form of ritual that doesn’t harm them, e.g. by giving the infant’s foreskin a small prick instead.

Goldstein countered that very few Jews use such a ritual, but this is beside the point. The great majority of Jews should learn from the small minority who think more about the welfare of the child than they do.

Someone mentioned that religion is man-made, and that Christianity has changed the perception of many things during history, so why shouldn’t Judaism and Islam also change the perception of something that is highly inappropriate?

Kamran Shah, who, in addition to being a doctor, was also an imam and a representative of the Danish Muslim Union, sharply distanced himself from the idea of changing attitudes - which we have heard before from Muslims - and he stated that there are virtually no Muslims that are not circumcised.

Shah argued that if circumcision is banned, we will see illegal backyard circumcisions under conditions that carry far greater health risks than if done openly. That argument doesn’t hold. We have heard the same argument in relation to female genital mutilation, but that has not stopped us from banning the practice. Further, it has not led to an increase in the illegal, and riskier, circumcision of little girls.

Shah appeared nice and friendly but he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He has explained that it is “haram” (sinful, i.e. forbidden by Allah) for good Muslim sisters to train to become social workers, health assistants, nurses, or medical laboratory technicians, because in these professions you come into physical contact with other people.

Shah’s discriminatory attitude to women was documented in a YouTube video that was freely available in 2014. Perhaps it became too embarrassing for himself or his community, as what is shown today is this:³

Shah preferred that women train as schoolteachers, so that there would be a lot of Muslim schools, which could counter the brainwashing that he believed was taking place in Danish schools. A more worthy representative of Danish Muslims could have been found for the hearing than this extreme imam who obviously did not like the country that had accepted him and treated him so well.

Else Smith, Director of the Board of Health, reviewed some of the medical evidence for circumcision and concluded that they could not, based on existing evidence, recommend circumcision as a health-promoting measure. But on the other hand, they saw no reason to advise against circumcision because the Board believed that the risks were very small.

This was countered by researcher in sexual health, Morten Frisch, who mentioned that the Board’s note on circumcision from 2013 was full of embarrassing errors, inaccuracies, trivialisations, and serious omissions that gave way to religious groups’ views on the matter.

Frisch pointed out that some children have died and that quite a few others have suffered serious operative complications. He referred to a report from Rigshospitalet, which showed that 5% of the children developed significant complications from the procedure.

Smith claimed that there had never been serious complications in Denmark, which was incorrect. The Board was aware of a case where an infant boy ended up in a coma at Hvidovre Hospital after a botched circumcision performed by a doctor at a private clinic in May 2014.

Two months after the hearing, a man circumcised a three-month-old boy, which resulted in a life-threatening infection and admission to hospital.⁴ The man was convicted of serious violence in the district court and received a three-month jail sentence.

Frisch discussed the harmful effects of circumcision on sex life whereas Shah strongly recommended it due to the “fantastic evidence” there was for the many medical benefits. Even if there were, Jews and Muslims did not introduce circumcision to prevent disease. It is an ancient and harmful ritual, nothing else.

Philosopher Klemens Kappel delivered a very strange argument. He said it could be okay for parents to inflict suffering on their children if the aim is to strengthen a community. His argument can be used to legitimise circumcision of girls, and it also fits very badly with the fact that we have abolished the right to discipline our children physically. It is infinitely worse to remove the foreskin of a little boy than to slap him in the face.

Tyge Trier, a lawyer and expert in human rights, advocated that the child should have a say on the decision about circumcision, but he argued that the child was able to see the consequences of such a decision already from 7 years of age. This is not correct. Children that young will be highly influenced by what their parents think. Moreover, tattooing is illegal in Denmark before the child is 18 years old, which is why circumcision should also be banned until the children reach adulthood and can make their own decisions.

Frisch pointed out that the mildest form of circumcision of girls is anatomically quite similar to circumcision of boys, and that it is inconsistent that we have banned one but not the other.

In ethics, we are obliged to demonstrate that there is a relevant, principled difference between two situations if we believe that something is permissible in one situation but not in the other. So, also for this reason, the argument for maintaining the right to male circumcision falls apart.

Joachim B Olsen from a political party stated that there are examples of female circumcision being abandoned in some cultures, and he was interested in knowing if this - due to the much-mentioned importance of circumcision for the community - had had the effect that the culture had collapsed.

Shah was asked to reply. He spoke for a very long time but avoided answering the question. Pressured by the chair, Mette Gjerskov, and the audience, Shah then claimed it was difficult to comment because people do not ask such questions in Denmark, but he added that it had not been a problem abroad. Quite an interesting remark considering all the fuss there was about the importance of circumcision for the community.

Several international conventions can be considered when discussing circumcision, but they are not in agreement. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Per Larsen, chair of the Children’s Council, commented on, is probably the most important one and also the strongest. It is a legally binding agreement setting out the rights of every child, regardless of their race, religion or abilities. It is clear from Article 24, paragraph 3,⁵ that you must not cause suffering to children:

“States Parties shall take all effective and appropriate measures with a view to abolishing traditional practices prejudicial to the health of children.”

Danish doctors’ associations were generally highly critical of ritual circumcision when the Board of Health revised its Guidance on circumcision of boys in December 2013 and sent the draft around for a hearing.

The Danish Society for General Practice has stated that “If circumcision is carried out without medical indication, it is mutilation.” The Children’s Council stated that the Board failed in its responsibility according to the Children’s Convention, Articles 3, 4 and 19 (protection of the child against any form of violence) by not mentioning in the instructions what needs to be considered before a doctor participates in circumcision, which they found violated legal and ethical principles.

According to the Board of Health, circumcision of boys is an operative intervention reserved for doctors. Remarkably, they nonetheless allow nondoctors to perform the circumcision if a doctor is present.

At Rigshospitalet, 315 boys were ritually circumcised from 1997 to 2003. Some of my colleagues have forgotten the most fundamental aspect of being a doctor: First, do no harm (primum non nocere).

In the USA, 64% of newborn boys undergo circumcision,⁶ even though only 3.6% of the population are Jews or Moslems. Many things are crazy in the USA but this is one of the craziest.

Boston Children’s Hospital list some potential benefits including less risk of getting penile cancer and HIV and over 90% reduction in the risk of urinary tract infections during infancy. These diseases are very rare and cannot justify male genital mutilation without informed consent.

Danish doctors and 80-90% of the population believe that non-medical circumcision of children under 18 should be illegal. Do something. Stop the barbary by law. Now.

References

1 Gøtzsche PC. Læger bør nægte ritual omskæring. Politiken 2014;Nov 14.

2 Gøtzsche PC. Ritual circumcision of boys: a barbaric practice that must stop. Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom 2022;Dec 5.

3 Unavailable YouTube video.

4 Gøtzsche PC. Omskæring er grov vold. Berlingske 2015;June 8.

5 Convention on the Rights of the Child. United Nations, General Assembly resolution 44/25 1989;Nov 20.

6 Circumcision. Boston Children’s Hospital (undated, accessed 14 Sept 2024).