By David Tuller, DrPH
October is a crowdfunding month at University of California, Berkeley. If you’d like to support my work, you can make a donation to the university (tax-deductible for US taxpayers) here.
Last week, Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote another scathing piece about the failure of the UK health care system to address the plight of people diagnosed with ME/CFS. (Monbiot’s previous column on the issue appeared in March; our interview about it is here.) The new column was pegged to the case of 27-year-old Maeve Boothby O’Neill, whose death in 2021 from complications of severe disease has received extensive media coverage in the UK (if not, unfortunately, in the US).
But Monbiot’s main focus in this column was the sorry history of London’s Science Media Centre in promoting egregiously flawed studies about the illness. The SMC, a PR agency masquerading as a purportedly neutral arbiter of scientific research, has been on Monbiot’s radar for decades. Yesterday, Monbiot and I discussed some of the issues he addressed in the column, including what he has referred to as the “cruel and bizarre cult” that has controlled it since its inception. (Because of a time lag on the zoom call, in a couple of places we seem to be talking over each other.)