This was clearly fraud done. Can nothing legally be done about this? Can people keep doing false studies which lead to our patient group getting harmed and keep getting away with this? They should at the very least be forced to publically appologise for purposely putting out misleading research and to just think public research money got used for this
It doesn't really work that way alas.
Absent a smoking gun, the absolute worst that is likely to happen is a retraction of the PACE papers.
(which would of course be great).
Note, for example, Wakefield has not been prosecuted in any other way than losing his medical licence, though his research was indirectly responsible for perhaps 10000 deaths.
http://antivaccinebodycount.com/
In Wakefields case, which lead to him losing his medical licence, he did many, many things wrong.
Misused various funding, and lied to various funding bodies.
Did not reveal that he was involved in court action against MMR when instigating the trials.
Did not get ethics committee approval for all the trial patients.
Actively lied in several respects to many organisations about how the patients were selected.
...
His conduct on the paper alone in the lancet was considerably worse than White et al.
Unless someone reveals a smoking gun (say an email 'I hate people who claim to have CFS and am intentionally lying in this paper'), more than a retraction isn't happening.
Unfortunately.
There is a gap between what would be unambiguous fraud - if for example there was evidence that they'd altered the data, and what can be brushed off as 'Our analysis was poorly chosen'.
Fraud requires intent to mislead.
I unfortunately do not doubt that White et al believe the initial paper to be true.