By Jerome Burne
With very little publicity, a defamation trial against the Mail on Sunday has just ended with a comprehensive victory for the two plaintiffs- Malcolm Kendrick GP and nutritionist Dr Zoe Harcombe. It’s a case that throws revealing and alarming light on the unscientific and brutal way some senior figures in the medical profession deal with criticism.
A key reason why the newspaper lost was because it took very little notice what is needed to defend yourself against a defamation claim. The case involved an article, published five years ago, that had labelled Harcombe and Kendrick “stain deniers”.
The personal attacks came fast and cutting
The basis for this claim was that they had written articles that made ‘knowingly false statements’ about the effectiveness of the cholesterol-lowering drugs statins and stressed the risks of the dangerous side effects. It was alleged that the intention of the two was to create a reputation that would get them work.
What proved fatal to the Mail’s defence was that it didn’t give the plaintiffs ‘reasonable right of reply’, instead it was, said the judge, ‘hollow and superficial.’ In stark contrast, the judgement continued, the doctors and cardiologists who were providing the information for the paper’s attack, had been allowed a ‘very significant and undue influence over the editorial process.’
It was all a bit of a laugh
This casual denigration of those challenging standard medical treatments is all too common. Patient’s questions about the possible benefits of a change of diet or lifestyle are often dismissed as irrelevant or mistaken. The Mail on Sunday article was part of a series it was running on “Fake News”.
When the editor who researched and organised the article – Barney Calman – was asked in court what he had read of Dr Kendrick’s work, he could only quote a few lines from the back cover of Kendrick’s book Statin Nation.
The cardiology experts who the Mail relied on to build their case, were equally dismissive of the plaintiffs. In one exchange Calman asked, “So Kendrick is right?” The expert – anonymised as X- replied, ‘I’ve never actually read him.’ Adding facetiously, ‘mea culpa!’
The article accused Dr Harcombe, who has a degree in mathematics from Oxford, of making up statistics to suit her arguments.
But the cost to the Mail wasn’t quite so amusing
Such disregard for the academic ability of the plaintiffs was to cost the Mail dearly. No figures for damages have been released, although it is said to be quite a bit less than the lawyer’s fees of 2 million for each side, that the Mail will be covering.
That might have been lower if those experts briefing Barney Calman had bothered to look into the history of the slur that ‘critics of statins were responsible for killing patients’, They would have found that one of them, Professor Sir Rory Collins, had been making this claim for a decade, ever since 2014 when I wrote about it here:
https://jeromeburne.com/2014/08/02/statin-critics-cleared-top-statin-advocate-knuckles-rapped/
That time Collins had demanded that the BMJ (British Medical Journal) withdraw two articles that had warned about statins, one by Dr Aseem Molhotra, who had been pictured in the Daily Mail article but not joined the case, and an American doctor.
Both doctors set out concerns about Collin’s work because it relied on controlled trials run by drug companies that were increasingly considered possibly unreliable. Even worse, Collin’s research centre in Oxford – The Cholesterol Treatment Trialists – held all the data from these trials which no independent researcher had been allowed to see. A basic scientific principle is that your research is open to checking by other experts.
An odd way of doing scientific research
The BMJ refused to withdraw the articles and set up a committee to consider the issue. Its conclusion was that making trial data unavailable ‘contributed to the uncertainty about the risks and benefits of the drugs’ and that whether questioning results from controlled trials was killing people was ‘still uncertain’, which should have been a warning to the Mail, that their experts had skin in the game.
These were precisely the sort of points that Harcombe and Kendrick had been making in their articles, ones which many academics might well consider useful observations that deserved investigation.
However, Professor Collins back then, as now, had an eccentric view of what constitutes normal scientific behaviour. Despite being asked to write an article rebutting the two BMJ articles, which is standard practice, all his correspondence with the journal arrived marked: ‘Not for publication.’
Then came a very big and expensive Mea Culpa
On the 5th of December 2024, the final judgement on the Kendrick Harcombe case was read out in court. There had been an apology published earlier in The Mail on Sunday which ‘accepted that allegations (about ‘false statements’ and ‘causing people not to take statins’) ‘were untrue and ought not to have been published.’ The paper’s total costs are now estimated to be about £6 million. Still, publishing untruths wasn’t that serious for Barney – he got promoted. A curious way for the paper to show contrition.
What is still unknown is the position of those cardiology and pharmacology experts who assisted the Mail to construct their case alongside Professor Collins. Did they agree with his practice of hiding data? Were any aware of what the plaintiffs had published? Had they been concerned about the career-destroying allegations being made about the plaintiffs?
The winds of change are blowing through medical certainties. For a long time, any claims that changes to nutrition or lifestyle, rather than drugs, could benefit such major disorders as cancer, Alzheimer’s or psychiatric conditions were roundly dismissed by experts as lacking evidence or simple quackery.
But now the NHS is calling for less prescribing and doctors are urged to consider non-drug treatments. The reason evidence can be hard to find is that pharma companies and the large charities mainly concentrate on testing drugs. There is an ongoing campaign to change that.
It would be good if the Harcombe Kendrick case served as a warning to eminent medics not to rush to judgment but find out why the alternatives might make sense and not to confidently slander those sounding warnings.
Jerome Burne
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