By David Tuller, DrPH
Last week, I spoke with
George Monbiot, a British investigative reporter and political activist, who has been a columnist for
The Guardian for almost 30 years. He and I have been in occasional communication in recent years over an issue of mutual interest—the scandalous mistreatment of patients suffering from the devastating illness (or cluster of illnesses) known as ME/CFS and, more recently, from Long Covid.
For years, I have been hoping that a prominent British journalist would take on the charlatans who foisted the fraudulent PACE trial upon an unsuspecting public. Last month, Monbiot gratified that desire with
a scathing column that correctly characterized the treatment of ME/CFS patients as a “national scandal.” (I blogged about the column
here.) As he explains, his interest in the issue was largely prompted by the actions of PACE investigator Professor Michael Sharpe. Three years ago, at an insurance industry gather organized by Swiss Re, Professor Sharpe essentially
blamed Monbiot for triggering patient reports of Long Covid by having written about it. (Monbiot’s initial 2021 column on Long Covid is
here, and his response to Professor Sharpe ridiculous criticism is
here; my blog about the contretemps is
here.)
I posted the video of our conversation
here. Below I have included a transcript, which I’ve edited for clarity and readability.
**********
DT: Hi, so I’m here with George Monbiot. I’m very tickled to be having a conversation with you. Thank you so much for joining me to discuss this. You wrote a column in The Guardian earlier this year that got a lot of attention and was basically about the sad history of ME/CFS and the research into it and what’s happened. Why don’t you discuss first how you even got into this issue.
GM: Thank you, David, and first I’d like to say thanks so much for your sterling work, which has been a great influence for me and has been very useful in summarizing a lot of the issues, which for journalists like me is absolutely crucial. You know, I try to do as deep a reading as I possibly can, but it’s also really great to have someone laying it out and saying, ‘Here is the situation as it stands.’ And I think you do that fantastically well.
DT: Thank you.
GM: So I first became interested in the issue of ME/CFS as a result of my interest in the issue of Long Covid, and that started as a personal thing. I had what is technically defined as Long Covid in that I had severe symptoms for 14 weeks. I mean, it’s nothing by comparison to what so many people have suffered, but it was a very frightening time because it made me wonder if I was ever going to get out of it. For 14 weeks, I couldn’t walk to the end of the road, and I thought, ‘Is this going to be my life?’ Because as we know it now seems to be the life of many Long Covid sufferers, to have that and even worse.
And then it became clear to me that there are certain aspects of Long Covid that are ...............................
