I thought it was a perfectly reasonable, innocuous, mild kind of summation of the research - although very Brit-centric in that it gave much more weight to the Scottish study of the children than to the two positive US studies about XMRV/MLVs - until you get to the last paragraph.
The last paragraph was such a shocking twist because it so completely ignored/negated all that had gone before in the editorial. I expected the last paragraph to say something like "Much remains unclear and unconfirmed, etc etc." Which would have been a perfectly fair thing to say.
But the two statements that poison the entire editorial, to me, are:
"There is a general consensus that CFS is a heterogeneous family of disorders, and it seems most likely that these disorders arise from a constellation of pathophysiological causes...CFS is still far from being a well-defined entity." There is no such "general consensus." This statement is deliberately constructed to broaden and blur the concept of "CFS" far beyond anything resembling a meaningful clinical entity, even far beyond the confusion engendered by the Oxford criteria or the empirical definition. This kind of statement strikes me as a "divide and conquer" tactic on the part of those who want to cling to the psychosocial explanation; hoping that, even if *some* CFS patients wind up having a well-defined disease with a distinct pathogenic cause, there will still be a lot of people left in the wastebasket who deserve to be there because their disease is still vague, ill-defined, heterogeneous...and nobody need be called to account for having left them there all these years.
The other statement, the really offensive and unforgivable one, is "The results in the Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine received great media attention. But they do not prove that CFS is a physical disease." This is nonsense on the face of it. I can easily tell that this whole last paragraph is the result of a strong desire to salvage the "psychosocial" hypothesis from the wreckage; they could have least been more honest about their intentions by saying "these results do not prove that *all* CFS is a physical disease." But the way it reads now makes no sense at all. And it's a hell of a shock to arrive at the last paragraph, after the preceding paragraphs about new evidence and new discoveries, and find that we're still supposed to be back at Square One, arguing whether CFS is "all in our heads." If objective findings of "oxidative stress and white blood cell apoptosis" aren't "physical," what the heck are they?
If were responsible for copyediting this editorial, I would queried the hell out of that last paragraph. It goes beyond hypocrisy into the utterly nonsensical.