Taking a rare break from trying to free Lucy Letby, Private Eye's Phil Hammond has written a justified excoriation of the star turn at Reform UK's recent conference, Aseem Malhotra. I agree with most of it and I have said same much the same myself, but I was struck by this sentence...
Malhotra is particularly dangerous because he talks sense in some areas (eg. lifestyle medicine) while spouting scaremongering conspiracies with no credible evidence base.
When, exactly, did Malhotra ever talk sense about "lifestyle medicine" or anything else? When he said that saturated fat was good for you? When he said that exercising won't help you lose weight? When he said that Italians have a low carb diet?
Perhaps Hammond is thinking about the time when he claimed that sugar was the new tobacco, but that's not really based on "credible evidence", is it?
Or perhaps he's thinking about when he claimed - in a journal article that had to be corrected - that the food industry has been “buying the loyalty of bent scientists". Doesn't that sound like a scaremongering conspiracy theory?
Maybe he's thinking about the time he said that people who have high cholesterol live longer than people who don't, and that Big Pharma doesn't want you to know that? Again, that sounds like a bit of a scaremongering conspiracy with no credible evidence base to me.
You can go back as far as you want but you will not find Malhotra "talking sense" about anything. All that has happened is that he has swapped high status conspiracy theories for low status conspiracy theories.
What makes Malhotra dangerous is not that he talks sense but that he abuses the trust that people have in doctors by cherry-picking evidence to suit a particular narrative. He's been doing it from the start. That is why he was able to hide in plain sight among 'public health' campaigners for so long.
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