September 2025

Trial By Error: My Letter to Cochrane’s Chief Executive Officer

By David Tuller, DrPH The other day, I posted yet another blog about Cochrane’s deeply flawed 2019 review of exercise therapy for what it called chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), and the organization’s decision last December to abandon a planned update. Specifically, I was commenting on a response from the review’s lead author, Lillebeth Larun, to …

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Trial By Error: Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki on the Keystone Symposium, the Debate on Viral Persistence, and Related Issues

By David Tuller, DrPH Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, is a leading investigator into long Covid. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, to and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.  She was one of …

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Trial By Error: Cochrane CFS Exercise Review “May Not Apply” to Patients Diagnosed with Newer ME/CFS Definitions, Per Lead Author

By David Tuller, DrPH It’s hard to keep up with everything going on in this field these days. So I missed the fact that Lillebeth Larun, the lead author behind the deeply flawed Cochrane review of exercise therapies for what the organization then called chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has concocted yet another unconvincing defense of …

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Trial By Error: “Mass Psychogenic Illness” at Heathrow Airport–NOT!

By David Tuller, DrPH On Monday afternoon, a bunch of people in Terminal 4 at Heathrow, London’s biggest airport, reported feeling ill. The reports led to concerns about a possible toxic exposure, which triggered an evacuation and major flight delays. An initial search for dangerous substances found nothing. On Tuesday, The Guardian ran an article …

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Trial By Error: Interview with Columbia’s Ian Lipkin on Heightened Immune Response in ME/CFS, Funding Challenges, and Current Research

By David Tuller, DrPH Last week, a research team from Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity published a paper called “Heightened innate immunity may trigger chronic inflammation, fatigue and post-exertional malaise in ME/CFS,” in the journal npj Metabolic Health and Disease. The senior investigator, Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, is director of the center and …

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Trial By Error: Australian Investigators Blame ME/CFS Patient Advocates for Poor Recruitment in “Active Video Gaming” Trial

By David Tuller, DrPH In a new paper, a team of investigators from the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia, describes a “pilot feasibility” trial for an ME/CFS intervention focused on physical activity. The trial fell dramatically short on recruitment efforts—a failure that the investigators appear to explicitly blame on the patient community rather …

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