Trial By Error: More Letters About BMJ’s Flawed Pediatric Studies
11 JUNE 2018
By David Tuller, DrPH
This morning I sent three more e-mails alerting interested parties to my concerns about two BMJ studies of children with ME/CFS. When it comes to research, kids are already a vulnerable population, and those with a stigmatizing illness even more so. That’s why it is both surprising and troubling that BMJ appears to have little interest in addressing the ethical and/or methodological violations that Virology Blog has documented in these pediatric studies.
I first sent an e-mail to the executive board of the CFS/ME Research Collaborative. Given that the CMRC is likely to continue to play a role in both research and health policy going forward, I believe members of the organization’s leadership should be alerted to serious problems in high-profile studies about the illness, especially those involving children.
Next I sent an e-mail to Jonathan Montgomery and Teresa Allen, who are, respectively, the chair and the interim chief executive of the
Health Research Authority, an arm of the National Health Service that, among other activities, oversees the process through which investigators receive approval from local research ethics committees. Finally, I sent an e-mail to Professor Dorothy Bishop, a well-known neuropsychologist at Oxford, who provided a statement last September for the Science Media Centre’s round-up of expert opinion about one of the studies.
As I have indicated repeatedly, the BMJ journals in question—
Archives of Disease in Childhood and
BMJ Open–have abrogated their editorial obligations. At this point, BMJ editorial director Fiona Godlee has a responsibility to explain how the journals got things so wrong in the first place and why they have refused to acknowledge the problems even when presented with irrefutable documentation. She should further explain why BMJ in this instance has appeared to place its reputational and institutional concerns above children’s interests and wellbeing.
