Article, The Times (London), 06/04/2024, How rogue concussion doctor is still damaging our trust in the science

It's rarely the case that individuals have such power. Their power comes from a wider acceptance of their ideas, to the point where opposition is nearly non-existent. If there wasn't broad support within the medical community for those ideas, they would have never taken hold. I'd say the same about the PACE gang. Even Wessely only had so much power as what the medical culture wanted his ideas to be manifested into reality, and especially how much financial incentives there are to cover this all up, no different than what the tobacco and asbestos or any other industry out there doing harm.

It's the same thing with dictators. There is a great video on this by CGP Grey: The rules for rulers. Even absolute dictators rule only as much as there are people willing to support their rule, who want the spoils of that rule. There are no dictators in this case, or in anything having to do with why women health care is so much worse, or anything to do with chronic illness. There is a wide cultural hunger for disbelief in medical problems, especially in illness, that makes those ideas appealing, and although it usually takes individuals to be the flag-bearers, they are largely interchangeable. If it wasn't them it'd be others, the outcome would be the same.

Long Covid provides the best example of this. Instead of a small handful of ideologues, we are seeing hundreds of small coteries of ideologues pushing the exact same ideas with the exact same intent and purpose, doing it exactly the same way, which they would have done this way whether or not others had paved the way for it. And it wasn't them, it'd be others. All this does is push the blame away from the systems that are supposed to safeguard people from this kind of nonsense, and pretending that they can't do anything about it lest they anger the aristocracy. There are technically laws against this, but the enforcement mechanism is nonexistent.

It takes systems to fail this miserably, individuals almost never have the power to do this. Systems are made up of people, and it's the balance of support that determines which ideas succeed and fail. Those same ideas are taught and parroted all over the place, and would likely be if it were anyone else leading the charge, or even if no one really managed to. Humans have a general problem with corruption, this is just one manifestation of it.