Dr Zoë Harcombe PhD and Dr Malcolm Kendrick win case – Apology from Mail On Sunday

[KennyA]

The Mail on Sunday has admitted that its allegations against Harcombe and Kendrick were untrue and has apologised, as well as paying all costs and substantial damages. It's a complete collapse. You might remember that the MoS accused both of being "statin deniers" and "having blood on their hands". The initial findings came out in June:

High Court dismisses Mail on Sunday’s public interest defence in “statin deniers” libel case - Carter-Ruck

In a major Judgment delivered on 25 June 2024, Mr Justice Nicklin has dismissed a public interest defence advanced by The Mail on Sunday in a libel claim brought by Dr Zoë Harcombe and Dr Malcolm Kendrick. The decision follows a preliminary trial last year in what the Judge described as “the...

www.carter-ruck.com

The Judge said then

“There is perhaps a palpable irony in the fact the Defendants, in Articles that so roundly denounced those alleged to be the purveyors of misinformation, so seriously misinformed their own readers.”

Text of apology below, link to today's MoS at the bottom.

On 3 March 2019, The Mail on Sunday published articles (one headlined "The deadly propaganda of the statin deniers") in which we featured Dr Zoë Harcombe PhD, a researcher, writer and public speaker on diet, health and nutritional science, and Dr Malcolm Kendrick, a GP, writer, and lecturer, with an interest in cardiovascular disease. Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick brought proceedings for libel.

At trial, the Court held that our articles had accused Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick of knowingly making false statements about statins, and that a very large number of people ceased to take statin medication and were exposed to serious risk of heart attack or stroke on a scale worse than the MMR vaccine scandal as a result of those false statements. The articles also alleged that there were strong grounds to suspect Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick of making these statements motivated by the hope that they would benefit materially, and included quotes from the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, which suggested that their statements were ‘pernicious lies’.

We accept the findings of the Court that the inclusion of the Hancock quote created a misleading impression of what he said. We also accept that these allegations are untrue and ought not to have been published.

We are happy to set the record straight, and apologise to Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick for the distress caused. We will not repeat the allegations and have agreed to pay substantial damages and costs.

Dr Zoë Harcombe PhD and Dr Malcolm Kendrick - Apology

On 3 March 2019, The Mail on Sunday published articles (one headlined

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[lovinglife]

That’s fantastic news! Thanks for posting this @KennyA

 

[KennyA]

That’s fantastic news! Thanks for posting this @KennyA

I had a small heads-up......

 

[Outlier]

Thanks KennyA - best news today!

 

[Lupf]

@KennyA The judge ruled in june 2024. I recall reading this.
So what is new? is it the last two sentences of the Mail on Sunday article of yesterday 13 Oct 2024?
"We also accept that these allegations are untrue and ought not to have been published.
We are happy to set the record straight, and apologise to Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick for the distress caused. We will not repeat the allegations and have agreed to pay substantial damages and costs."
The apology and the payments were presumably required by the judge's verdict. Can you confirm or clarify, please.

 

[Susie1961]

The Mail on Sunday has admitted that its allegations against Harcombe and Kendrick were untrue and has apologised, as well as paying all costs and substantial damages. It's a complete collapse. You might remember that the MoS accused both of being "statin deniers" and "having blood on their hands". The initial findings came out in June:

High Court dismisses Mail on Sunday’s public interest defence in “statin deniers” libel case - Carter-Ruck

In a major Judgment delivered on 25 June 2024, Mr Justice Nicklin has dismissed a public interest defence advanced by The Mail on Sunday in a libel claim brought by Dr Zoë Harcombe and Dr Malcolm Kendrick. The decision follows a preliminary trial last year in what the Judge described as “the...

www.carter-ruck.com

The Judge said then

“There is perhaps a palpable irony in the fact the Defendants, in Articles that so roundly denounced those alleged to be the purveyors of misinformation, so seriously misinformed their own readers.”

Text of apology below, link to today's MoS at the bottom.

On 3 March 2019, The Mail on Sunday published articles (one headlined "The deadly propaganda of the statin deniers") in which we featured Dr Zoë Harcombe PhD, a researcher, writer and public speaker on diet, health and nutritional science, and Dr Malcolm Kendrick, a GP, writer, and lecturer, with an interest in cardiovascular disease. Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick brought proceedings for libel.

At trial, the Court held that our articles had accused Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick of knowingly making false statements about statins, and that a very large number of people ceased to take statin medication and were exposed to serious risk of heart attack or stroke on a scale worse than the MMR vaccine scandal as a result of those false statements. The articles also alleged that there were strong grounds to suspect Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick of making these statements motivated by the hope that they would benefit materially, and included quotes from the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, which suggested that their statements were ‘pernicious lies’.

We accept the findings of the Court that the inclusion of the Hancock quote created a misleading impression of what he said. We also accept that these allegations are untrue and ought not to have been published.

We are happy to set the record straight, and apologise to Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick for the distress caused. We will not repeat the allegations and have agreed to pay substantial damages and costs.

Dr Zoë Harcombe PhD and Dr Malcolm Kendrick - Apology

On 3 March 2019, The Mail on Sunday published articles (one headlined

www.dailymail.co.uk

There are many doctors and specialists speaking out against statins and other drugs these days and good job too because we have been lied to for decades, Dr Suneel Dhand and Prof Ben Bikman are both amazing and thankfully their honesty is a breath of fresh air big pharma has had things their way for long enough to boost their billions, it’s disgusting.

 

[AloeSvea]

My understanding, re the dates, is that the apology is the news @Lupf. Published in the Daily Mail on Sunday, the 13th of October 2024.

Isn't it wonderful?!! .

Very important to keep media in line. No excuse for sloppy journalism, when in cases like this (ie the truth about cholesterol, diet, and CVD risk and lowering risk) the truth is in fact out there.

Marvellous for people with serious risk of CVD (which includes people with diabetes - of course!). Marvellous absolutely for Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick.

 

[LivingLightly]

Thank you for sharing the good news and subsequent apology @KennyA

 

[KennyA]

@KennyA The judge ruled in june 2024. I recall reading this.
So what is new? is it the last two sentences of the Mail on Sunday article of yesterday 13 Oct 2024?
"We also accept that these allegations are untrue and ought not to have been published.
We are happy to set the record straight, and apologise to Dr Harcombe and Dr Kendrick for the distress caused. We will not repeat the allegations and have agreed to pay substantial damages and costs."
The apology and the payments were presumably required by the judge's verdict. Can you confirm or clarify, please.

@Lupf - in June the judge gave a preliminary ruling on the basis of the evidence heard. He rejected the Mail's "public interest" defence and indicated that as soon as it was clear there was a respectable professional anti-statin view (albeit one never mentioned in the MSM), then the portrayal of Harcombe and Kendrick was indeed libellous.

There was a further defence open to the Mail, that the accusations were true. They got a very clear steer from the judge that this might well be wasting the Court's time.

Accordingly, it looked it it was all over and the only thing left was for the respective lawyers to work out exactly how much money the Mail would have to fork over. But - the Mail could have decided to have a go right up to yesterday. This now makes it official - the mail admit they have lost and that they were wrong. They won't be printing much about statins in the future, I suppose.

And it lays down a card for any other media outlet - you can't select one side of a professional/clinical argument and present it as if it's the only one, and then insult anyone who disagrees with you. .

Of course, it will change everything in how the statin/cholesterol argument is reported in the UK press, and it's unlikely that as far as the UK media goes we'll ever again get the unthinking pro-statin arguments we've all been accustomed to seeing.

 

[Outlier]

It will be interesting to see how that spools out, and how long it will take the ponderous wheels of the NHS to turn into acknowledgement.

 

[Chris24Main]

That's made my day...!!
Thanks @KennyA ..

 

[KennyA]

I understand there will (sometime) be a statement in open Court - ie, it becomes part of the Court record, on the detail of the case. And agreeing costs will take quite some time, it always does.

The statement in Court needs to be agreed between lawyers - ie both sides need to agree what the judgment means and why - could be interesting.

We're probably going to do a debrief on the case and the possible consequences at our next Low-Carb Skipton meeting in early November.

 

[KennyA]

It will be interesting to see how that spools out, and how long it will take the ponderous wheels of the NHS to turn into acknowledgement.

I'm not sure this judgement goes that far. It recognises that there is not one "correct" view on statins/cholesterol: so it cannot be claimed that therefore anyone who disagrees with it is a fool at best.

What it doesn't do, and the Court has expressly said it wouldn't do, is establish who is professionally correct. That needs to be decided elsewhere - and based on recent research and the 2019 statements from the American College of Cardiology, it might have been already - agin the pro-statin side. If cholesterol is not a killer, then taking a drug that lowers cholesterol is a waste of time at best.

I don't think we'll see the media looking into this too closely - after all, they all endorsed the statin/cholesterol hypothesis and they all still push the low-fat "eatwell plate" approach. Who's going to be the first to admit that there's another side to what they've been pushing at people for 45 years?

It should, I hope, raise a few questions with people who are not as steeped in this as most of us on here though - why did the pro-statin camp feel the need to attack and vilify people who thought otherwise? why was it not possible to convince those who disagreed with the cholesterol hypothesis by using a scientific argument? why did the media not explore all sides to the statin issue - was it because they were told in advance that those who disagreed were all nutjobs? why did the Department of Health give a supportive and endorsing quote to the Mail story that they had not even seen? (actually, I think I know the answer to that bit).


One thing I'd suggest is sharing this widely... send your friends the link.

[Edited (in red) to remove ambiguity]

 

[Lupf]

What it doesn't do, and the Court has expressly said it wouldn't do, is establish who is professionally correct. That needs to be decided elsewhere - and based on recent research and the 2019 statements from the American College of Cardiology, it might have been already - agin the pro-statin side. If cholesterol is not a killer, then taking a drug that lowers cholesterol is a waste of time at best.

Hi @KennyA

I've looked at the report "2019 ACC/AHA Guideline on the Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: A Report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Clinical Practice Guidelines", see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30894318/

In the top 10 recommendation you'll find
...
6. For adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus, lifestyle changes, such as improving dietary habits and achieving exercise recommendations, are crucial. If medication is indicated, metformin is first-line therapy, followed by consideration of a sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitor or a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist.
...
9. Statin therapy is first-line treatment for primary prevention of ASCVD in patients with elevated low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels (190 mg/dL or 4.9 mmol/l), those with diabetes mellitus, who are 40 to 75 years of age, and those determined to be at sufficient ASCVD risk after a clinician–patient risk discussion.

While recommendation #6 is good, even if you might not agree with the actual dietary advice in #4, which includes "miminze ... red meat"
recommendation #9 says all T2 above 40 should be on statins (highlighted in red).

So I am afraid, I don't share your optimism yet.

Note also that while Zoe Harcombe and Malcolm Kendrick won in court, they are still vilified.
Neither of them has a Wikipedia entry, but both are listed on the infamous RationalWiki, which lists as its purpose:
i) Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement; (ii) Documenting the full range of crank ideas; (iii) Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism; and (iv) Analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Malcolm_Kendrick

Zoë Harcombe

Zoë Harcombe is an author, global warming denialist, nutritionist and cholesterol denialist from Wales. Harcombe disagrees with mainstream medical advice on dieting. She has been criticized for promoting misleading health advice that is not based on scientific evidence.[2] She sells a...

rationalwiki.org

 

[KennyA]

One step at a time - the Mail only admitted defeat last Sunday. This has been going on for years and it doesn't vanish overnight. Wikipedia is a lost cause.

The 2019 JACC paper is this one, where the Journal find the College's own guidance to have no scientific basis:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109720356874?via=ihub=&utm_source=arrow.proteinpower.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=the-arrow-188

[Edited to remove typo]

 

[Melgar]

Great result. At the very least this result against the Mail on Sunday allows persons to feel confident that arguments against Statin use are valid and are relevant in the face of pro-statin use. In short people can feel a degree of confidence when deciding whether to use statins or not.

 

[Lupf]

One step at a time - the Mail only admitted defeat last Sunday. This has been going on for years and it doesn't vanish overnight. Wikipedia is a lost cause.

The 2019 JACC paper is this one, where the Journal find the College's own guidance to have no scientific basis:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109720356874?via=ihub=&utm_source=arrow.proteinpower.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=the-arrow-188

[Edited to remove typo]

@KennyA this is the paper on saturated fats, which of course is also excellent,
but it doesn't discuss statins, it doesn't even mention it.
While for you it is clear that this implies that statins are "a waste of time at best",
I would like to see this connection published in a medical journal.
The 2019 ACC/AHA Guideline on the Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease need such papers,
before they can update the guidelines, which currently is telling GPs to prescribe statins to all diabetics.

You said yourself, that while the court has now made it clear that the vilifying of statin critical people
is wrong, it correctly said that this does not imply what the correct answer will be.
This needs scientific studies.

 

[KennyA]

@KennyA this is the paper on saturated fats, which of course is also excellent,
but it doesn't discuss statins, it doesn't even mention it.
While for you it is clear that this implies that statins are "a waste of time at best",
I would like to see this connection published in a medical journal.
The 2019 ACC/AHA Guideline on the Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease need such papers,
before they can update the guidelines, which currently is telling GPs to prescribe statins to all diabetics.

You said yourself, that while the court has now made it clear that the vilifying of statin critical people
is wrong, it correctly said that this does not imply what the correct answer will be.
This needs scientific studies.

I don't disagree, and I would like to see that too - but I'm not optimistic it will be soon.

It takes something in the medical world for people to print any "we was wrong" statements at all, and this one needs the inferences reading into it. If eating saturated fat is not an issue (as they are now saying) then the thing that eating saturated fat was supposed to cause (high cholesterol) cannot be an issue, and therefore the drug (the statin) prescribed to lower cholesterol is unnecessary at best. There are any number of recently published studies which show that low cholesterol is associated with raised mortality, and that the original pro-low fat studies were fiddled.

Is the use of cholesterol in mortality risk algorithms in clinical guidelines valid? Ten years prospective data from the Norwegian HUNT 2 study

Total cholesterol and all-cause mortality by sex and age: a prospective cohort study among 12.8 million adults - Scientific Reports

Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968-73)

Each of these has a comprehensive listof references to follow up. I know I post these a lot!

And equally if you're a government that's been pushing the low-fat high carb lifestyle since the 1980s, are you going to just announce one morning that your advice was wrong, and we should all go back to restricting carbs for weight loss? That was of course a world in which T2 barely figured, where obesity levels were much less, and in which governments didn't (in peacetime anyway) try to tell people what to eat.

I'm sure that in that scenario a large number of people might be looking for some sort of compensation - eg "I followed your advice - and I got t2 - and I lost my foot" etc.

I would also expect to see some sort of attempted rebuttal from the pro-statin lobby - it might be less than expected because statins are mostly off-patent now and the big money is being made from weight loss jabs.

It took more than a generation to get here and I fully expect it will take more than a generation to unwind.

 

[Lupf]

@KennyA said:
"I don't disagree, and I would like to see that too - but I'm not optimistic it will be soon.
...
It took more than a generation to get here and I fully expect it will take more than a generation to unwind."

I tend to agree with you, and your are in good company.
The physicist Max Planck is quoted saying that science advances one funeral at a time. Or more precisely: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." This was the case with quantum physics, which revolutionised physics.
The problem with diet is not only the science, which is making progress, but as you say, others are involved as well.
You are worried about governments not willing to admit they were wrong, but commercial interests from the pharma industry
will resist against all evidence.

The fact that smoking causes CVD and kills was long established, but Tobacco companies refused to accept this, hired scientists who were paid to claim black is white, while the public long had made up its mind and smoking rates in men reduced substantially. It took class action suits in the US and a new generation of decision makers in government who did not grow up any more with "smoking is cool" to turn this around.

While the shaming of fatty food, actually saturated fatty acids, is turning, commercial interests on cholesterol lowering drugs will continue to overhype the benefits and underacknowledge their side effects despite mounting evidence against. They will do everything to keep their money printing machine going. You can see what they are doing to Kendrick, Harcombe and others now that they are winning, read e.g. the article from Malcolm Kendrick in https://brokenscience.org/kendrick-harcombe-trial-the-conspiracy/, it is scary to imagine to what they will resort to when they will be losing. However eventually the case against statins for all will prevail one GP surgery at a time.

 

[KennyA]

@KennyA said:
"I don't disagree, and I would like to see that too - but I'm not optimistic it will be soon.
...
It took more than a generation to get here and I fully expect it will take more than a generation to unwind."

I tend to agree with you, and your are in good company.
The physicist Max Planck is quoted saying that science advances one funeral at a time. Or more precisely: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." This was the case with quantum physics, which revolutionised physics.
The problem with diet is not only the science, which is making progress, but as you say, others are involved as well.
You are worried about governments not willing to admit they were wrong, but commercial interests from the pharma industry
will resist against all evidence.

The fact that smoking causes CVD and kills was long established, but Tobacco companies refused to accept this, hired scientists who were paid to claim black is white, while the public long had made up its mind and smoking rates in men reduced substantially. It took class action suits in the US and a new generation of decision makers in government who did not grow up any more with "smoking is cool" to turn this around.

While the shaming of fatty food, actually saturated fatty acids, is turning, commercial interests on cholesterol lowering drugs will continue to overhype the benefits and underacknowledge their side effects despite mounting evidence against. They will do everything to keep their money printing machine going. You can see what they are doing to Kendrick, Harcombe and others now that they are winning, read e.g. the article from Malcolm Kendrick in https://brokenscience.org/kendrick-harcombe-trial-the-conspiracy/, it is scary to imagine to what they will resort to when they will be losing. However eventually the case against statins for all will prevail one GP surgery at a time.

I was thinking of the Planck quote but couldn't remember who it was. Thanks for mentioning it. It does sum it up the situation perfectly.

Those of us who have turned things around for ourselves don't need to be told, but we are a drop in the ocean compared to the people who are still being force fed the low fat, high carb message from useful idiots in the media.