Canadian GET/CBT Campaigners Publish Propaganda Cosplaying as Research on Twitter Trends
5 Comments / By David Tuller / 2 June 2025
By David Tuller, DrPH
McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, seems to be Canada’s Ground Zero for psychosomatic theorizing. In March, 2021, a psychiatrist-in-training, Jeremy Devine, published an opinion in The Wall Street Journal titled “The Dubious Origins of Long Covid.” (I wrote about it here.) Devine cited the PACE trial favorably, as if its findings were meaningful.
The animating trope of Devine’s screed amounted to this: People with extended, non-specific medical complaints after a bout of COVID-19 were experiencing psychogenic symptoms and/or had a mental illness. He delivered this categorical message without nuance, caution or caveats. “Long Covid is largely an invention of vocal patient activist groups,” he declared.
Devine’s article presaged a series of further questionable efforts emanating from McMaster. Last fall, The BMJ published a problematic paper, spearheaded by investigators from McMaster, called “Interventions for the management of long covid (post-covid condition): living systematic review.” (I wrote about this piece of crap here and here.) Paul Garner, the British infectious disease expert who has boasted ad infinitum that he cured himself of Long Covid with his manly cognitions, joined the group as a co-author. His participation almost always ensures that some of the arguments advanced will be unfounded and ridiculous.
Also last fall, a McMaster-based group called Canadian Guidelines for Post COVID-19 Condition (CAN-PCC) released a set of draft recommendations said to be for preventing, diagnosing, and treating Long Covid. The treatment recommendations included exercise and cognitive behavior therapy, which understandably raised concerns among advocates for both Long Covid and ME/CFS patients (I wrote about the issue here; my friend and colleague Brian Hughes, a psychology professor at the University of Galway, blogged about it here.)
Now McMaster is at it again. A research team from the university has recently published a study called “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the 2021 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence Guidelines on Public Perspectives Toward Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Thematic and Sentiment Analysis on Twitter (Rebranded as X).” The study, in the Journal of Medical Internet Research,” contains some interesting data—which the investigators promptly deploy in the campaign to promote psycho-behavioral approaches to ME/CFS and Long Covid. This is propaganda cosplaying as research.
The senior and corresponding author, Jason Busse, is a professor in the department of anaesthesia* in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster. [I originally wrote that he was a “professor of anaesthesiology.” I apologize for the error.] Professor Busse was also the senior author of last year’s “living review” of Long Covid interventions. He apparently gets his fingers into a lot of pies! In this paper, Professor Busse and his colleagues position their own perspective as normative—i.e. “evidence-based”–in contrast to the views of patients, which are presented as irrational, biased and oppositional.
In other words, the investigators have everything backwards
