10 February 2025

When filmmaker Janus Bang and I came to Stanford on our USA tour a year ago to interview the world’s most cited medical researcher, Professor John Ioannidis, I looked much forward to hearing his views on recent events in The Cochrane Collaboration. John and I are friends, have published several important articles together, and John supported me wholeheartedly in the article, Cochrane crisis: Secrecy, intolerance and evidence-based values, when Cochrane’s CEO, Mark Wilson, had arranged a show trial against me in 2018 because I threatened his dictatorial position where he controlled the Governing Board and everything else in Cochrane. 

The CEO got me expelled even though Cochrane’s own lawyer, hired to find an excuse for expelling me, exonerated me in his report. I have described the events in my freely available book, The decline and fall of the Cochrane empire. I lost my job, and Wilson suddenly disappeared in the middle of a month after having harmed Cochrane immensely, which I had tried to prevent as an elected Governing Board member. 

In 2018, John wrote to the Minister of Health trying to prevent my dismissal: 

I am a tenured professor at Stanford University and the current rate of citations of my work in the scientific literature (>3,000 times per month) is the highest among all physicians in the world and among the 10 highest across all scientists in the world. I have unconditional admiration for Peter Gøtzsche. Peter is undoubtedly a giant, one of the greatest scientists of our times and one of the most influential, impactful, and useful voices in medicine at large. I cherish enormously his contributions. I believe he is the most recognizable and prominent scientist that Denmark currently has. His dismissal from the Cochrane board two months ago came as a total shock to me. The possibility of compounding this shock with his dismissal also from the Rigshospitalet would deal a severe blow to medicine, democracy, freedom of thought, and justice. I believe that basic respect for scientific discourse requires that you do not eliminate your opponents through administrative machinations. Ousting Peter from the Rigshospitalet damages the reputation of Denmark as a free country. 

John always speaks very clearly and to the point. He has been involved with Cochrane for many years, which is why his views on the good and the bad days of Cochrane and what he thinks the future will bring are very interesting. 

See my interview with John. Some of this will become part of our documentary film about Cochrane, which has the working title: “The honest professor and and the fall of the Cochrane empire.” You can support the film by donating here.   

Cochrane was likely the most important organisation in healthcare established in the last 100 years. It has been sad to see the developments for the worse in the last decade, as we so badly need this organisation, provided it can stay free from commercial conflicts of interest and guild interests. 

This is not currently the case. A week after Cochrane had expelled me, BMJ’s Editor-in-Chief, Fiona Godlee, wrote in the article, Reinvigorating Cochrane, that Cochrane should be committed to holding industry and academia to account, and that my expulsion from Cochrane reflected “a deep seated difference of opinion about how close to industry is too close.” 

Best wishes 

Peter C Gøtzsche
Professor emeritus and Director
Institute for Scientific Freedom
Copenhagen
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Film and interview channel: Broken Medical Science