I mean I think they rotate their names mostly just because
But unless you've got good reason to believe so, I don't know about the others. Just because they support GET/CBT doesn't mean that they don't think CFS is a real disease or that it's psychosocial. If you looked at the researchers associated with universities who think GET/CBT are effective, a large majority of them would think CFS is biological and most of them wouldn't think it's psychosocial.
Are we living in the same country, I wonder? The vast majority of the medical profession in England and Wales regard ME/CFS in the same way as Wessely, and the Netherlands comes a very close second for BPS (really psychiatric) modelling of the illness. They have tried, as far as possible to ignore biomedical research, particularly if it was conducted abroad, and the NICE guidelines still offer succour to this pernicious f the disease.
Esther Crawley, like Wessely, likes to fudge, but I have very recently heard (or read?) her repeat the old Wessely school position that the illness begins with a virus, which resolves, leaving behind fatigue perpetuated by deconditioning and fear of activity.
This is Hans Knoop's current statement on the website for the psychology centre he works for (where he is "Head of the Expert Centre for Chronic Fatigue:
"Chronic fatigue can be the result of a chronic illness, but when a somatic explanation is lacking, we sometimes speak of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)."
Speaks for itself, really, doesn't it? He has also co-authored papers on the effectiveness of CBT with Peter White, lead investigator on the PACE trial and one of the most notorious of the British BPS CFS "researchers".
I completely disagree about Wessely's irrelevance - he is totally tied in as advisor to successive UK governments and all his gongs aren't given him for nothing.
But I agree, this particular paper seems rather pointless: people with more symptoms are more likely to be genuinely ill and therefore less likely to feel better after an exercise programme and a couple of lectures about stopping their illness thinking. But the authors must have had a purpose in writing it, and it's most obvious use to the BPS school who wrote it is as an evidence base for hanging on to less severely affected patients once the NHS finally squares up to the biological nature of the illness.