Ben Goldacre
 Ben Goldacre     (doctor, health bureaucrat, writer) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 20 May 1974 London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | UK |
| Alma mater | Magdalen College (Oxford), UCL Medical School, King's College London |
| Parents | • Michael Goldacre • Susan Traynor |
| Relatives | Robyn Williams |
Ben Michael Goldacre is a British doctor, health bureaucrat, academic and science writer.
Health data
HDRUK was an institute convened by the UK health minister (Matt Hancock) and the NHS in order to collate the health data of UK NHS patients (without their explicit consent) for research purposes. It was linked to a repository overseen by Ben Goldacre called OpenSafely run out of Oxfordwhich was supposed to be used by researchers for the same purpose of giving them access to patient level data.[1]
The first thing that OpenSafely did was publish a paper during Covid that tried to show that hydroxychloroquine was not effective for COVID. Except it conveniently left out the fact that the population it studied had less than half the mortality of the rest of the UK for COVID during this time, at 0.2%. In that paper was a massive list of conflicts of interest but the worst irony was the Data Sharing Statement, for which 4 years earlier Goldacre was the most vocal proponent of full data transparency.[1]
