re: Nature: Cochrane Collaboration (evidence-based) rife with "top-down authoritarian culture"

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Recently some major established labs have been going back through medical and social science seminal papers to try and reproduce the results. Less than 15% reproducible.

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The organization — which carries out systematic reviews of health-care interventions — told Nature it had received “numerous complaints” about Gøtzsche after the publication earlier this year of a critique he co-authored, entitled ‘The Cochrane HPV vaccine review was incomplete and ignored important evidence of bias’ and published in the BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.

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HPV vaccine safety: Cochrane launches urgent investigation into review after criticisms BMJ 2018; 362 doi: LINK (Published 09 August 2018) Cite this as: BMJ 2018;362:k3472

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Rapid Response: Cochrane HPV vaccine review severely compromised by conflicts of interest The recently published Cochrane HPV vaccine review[1] is severely compromised and cannot be trusted due to the conflicts of interest of authors on the original protocol and the final review document. Due to serious conflicts of interests, Cochrane should withdraw this review.

In February 2016, I challenged David Tovey, Editor in Chief of Cochrane, directly about protocol author Lauri Markowitz's conflicts of interest. Catherine Riva et al raised the problem of conflicts of interest in December 2014 in a comment on the original protocol[2], specifically pointing out the failure to properly disclose conflicts of interest by Lauri Markowitz and Marc Arbyn. Arbyn remained an author throughout all stages. Lauri Markowitz is an employee of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and is involved in HPV vaccination promotion. The US Government benefits from the sale of HPV vaccine products, i.e. a letter to Dr Eric Suba from the US National Archives and Records Administration (November 2010) discusses royalties the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) receives from the sales of HPV vaccines. (See a copy of the letter via this link: LINK Indicating a stunning lack of transparency, it appears the value of these royalties is kept secret, i.e. it is protected from disclosure under the US Freedom of Information Act. The NIH Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) oversaw the patenting of the HPV vaccine technology and licensed the technology to Merck, the maker of Gardasil, which sought approval for Gardasil around the world, working with the PATH group, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in distributing the HPV vaccine in developing countries.[3] The HPV vaccine technology was also licensed to GlaxoSmithKline[4]. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been very influential in promoting HPV vaccination[5]. In regards to the Cochrane HPV vaccine review, Cochrane has a conflict of interest in that it is a beneficiary of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding, i.e. to "support the development of Cochrane's next generation evidence system, with a specific focus on maternal and child health".[6] The World Mercury Project has provided critical analysis of Cochrane's conflicts of interest via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other organisations[7]. As a matter of urgency, Cochrane needs to consider conflicts of interest in its undertakings, as these are compromising Cochrane's mission to provide credible and unbiased information to support informed health decision-making.

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