Following the Money
I recently had the double pleasure of sitting down with two of the most insightful and outspoken figures in British medicine:
Professor Paul Goddard, a radiologist who did early work on MRI and CT, and Professor Angus Dalgleish, an oncologist and immunologist with decades of research behind him in cancer and HIV.
Paul opened by insisting that “Gus is famous and I’m infamous.” That set the tone for an hour that was by turns combative, funny and sharply critical of the institutions both men spent their careers inside.
watch the interview below:
We met to talk about two books they have written together with a cast of collaborators: The Death of Science and its follow-up, Profiteering from Doom, for which I was privileged to write the foreword.
Writing a book is hard work, so I started with the obvious question: why bother?
“You’re the first person who’s agreed with me”
For Paul, it began in early 2020. It was clear to both men, he said, that the new virus was spreading from person to person, even as the World Health Organization and Chinese authorities were saying otherwise.
Then came two papers, one in The Lancet and one in Nature Medicine, which in his words declared a laboratory origin impossible and cast anyone who suggested otherwise as a conspiracy theorist.
Gus, working with his colleague Birger Sørensen, had been studying the spike protein and had come to the opposite conclusion. In their view its unusually high positive charge did not look like anything found in naturally occurring coronaviruses, and would let it bind to many cell types in the body.
Gus phoned Paul to tell him he thought the virus had been made in a laboratory. Paul agreed. “You’re the first person who’s agreed with me,” Gus told him. “Everybody’s telling me that I’m a conspiracy theorist.”
Paul felt the hostility personally. He recalled being shouted at on his allotment by a neighbour who had absorbed the prevailing line. He had, he said, been lecturing for years about the risk of a novel coronavirus, and the pandemic pushed him to finish a stalled book on the history of plagues, Pandemic, with a foreword by Gus.
A second book, The Origin of the Virus, came about through the Italian journalist Paolo Barnard. He had written to scientists on both sides of the debate hoping to present the arguments fairly. According to Paul, the natural-origin camp sent him anger rather than evidence, while Gus and others sent him science. Barnard changed tack and the book argued for a laboratory origin.
Following the money
Gus described how he went digging. Scientists in Wuhan, he said, had already published work in major journals describing the kind of genetic inserts he and Sørensen had flagged. Many of those papers carried the name of the American virologist Ralph Baric, whom Gus credits with pioneering techniques for stitching viral RNA together without leaving a trace. When Gus raised this, he said, a member of the Royal Society told him it could not be done.
Two things stood out in the small print: funding routed through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, and grants from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, then led by Anthony Fauci.
That led Gus to the Nature Medicine paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, which he believes was organised to close down the lab-leak debate. Reading it, he said, he found that its own references could be used to argue the opposite of its conclusion. “It was like a Guardian article,” he said, “where the headline’s completely the opposite of what’s in it.” The paper was then used against him.
The broader lesson, for both men, was that dissent carries a price. Scientists who disagree can lose funding, Paul said, and doctors who question vaccines or drugs risk being sacked or referred to the General Medical Council. “And that has been happening ever since.”
I suggested this is the antithesis of science, which moves forward by argument and counter-argument. Shut that down, replace it with aggression, and you get exactly what science should not be.
The Death of Science
Paul sees the COVID episode as a symptom of something older. Over the past 20 to 30 years, he said, hospitals stopped encouraging doctors to do research, and many consultants are now appointed without ever having written a paper.
That matters, he argued, because if you have never written a paper you do not understand the limitations of the ones you read. “In science we don’t try to prove things,” he said. “We actually try to prove the thing to be wrong.” A good idea is one that has survived repeated attempts by peers around the world to knock it down.
Safe spaces and deplatforming on campus are, to men who came of age in the freedoms of the 1960s and 70s, a totalitarian turn. Hence The Death of Science, written with a broad group of contributors including Professor David Nutt, Dr Ros Jones, Dr Clare Craig, Paul’s two sons and the astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe.
The collaborators do not all agree, and that is deliberate. Paul does not share Wickramasinghe’s view that bugs can arrive from space, but he defends his right to argue it. “That’s the whole point,” he said. It has been a quiet success too: Paul put sales at more than 7,000 copies, where a science book usually sells a few hundred.
The common thread, as Gus put it, is simple: follow the money.
The warnings nobody heeded
For Gus, the most important part of The Origin of the Virus was a warning. He and his colleagues argued that around 80% of the spike protein resembled human epitopes, and that using it in vaccines risked autoimmunity. Sir Richard Dearlove, he said, took that work to the Cabinet; Sir Patrick Vallance, then Chief Scientific Adviser, has never engaged with why it was set aside. Gus had also proposed a vaccine design that avoided the spike altogether.
In a separate paper, he said, the team predicted clotting problems, including antibodies against platelet factor 4, the mechanism behind vaccine-induced thrombosis with thrombocytopenia. They also flagged Guillain-Barré syndrome. Gus recalled that a US flu vaccination programme in the 1970s was halted over Guillain-Barré cases, and said he personally knew two people who developed it after COVID vaccination.
He was struck, he said, by how many Yellow Card reports came in, and noted that it was AstraZeneca, not the regulator, that eventually withdrew its vaccine. He gave the company some credit for keeping an open side-effect database.
He went further on how the vaccine rollout was framed. Since 1986, US manufacturers have had liability protection for vaccines, and Gus argued that this created an incentive to classify products as vaccines. In his view mRNA products are better described as gene therapy, and indemnity removed any pressure to chase side effects. He also argued that a vaccine needing repeated boosters is evidence it is not working, and that a third dose risks blunting T-cell responses.
Gus now goes further still. Drawing on the book Vaccines: Amen, he argued that much of vaccinology has been treated as an article of faith rather than tested science, and he praised Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for questioning the size of the childhood schedule. “I didn’t realise I’d entered a high church,” he said. Paul added that the NHS is treated as a religion too.
Both men acknowledged the courage of younger doctors who speak out, given that careers and mortgages are at stake. Paul, who said he was blacklisted after the 1975 junior doctors’ dispute, kept other businesses so he could always say what he liked.
A cancer treatment left on the shelf
Gus is one of the most published medical researchers in the country, across oncology, HIV and tumour immunology. He recalled being told decades ago by what is now Cancer Research UK that cancer immunology was “a phenomenon confined to mice”. It has since become one of the most important fields in human oncology.
I raised his work on IMM-101, a heat-killed mycobacterial preparation, which I believe has real potential in cancer prevention and treatment. I find it outrageous that the regulator has not even allowed doctors to use it on a compassionate basis.
Gus had news. A placebo-controlled study in Canada, he said, gave IMM-101 to cancer patients in 2020 to see whether it protected them against COVID. When the Pfizer vaccine was approved, the COVID arm was stopped as unethical, but follow-up continued for cancer. The data have only now been released, five years on.
He described the results as unbelievable: across cancer types and treatments, he said, patients who received just three doses showed significantly longer time to progression and better overall survival. He would normally give six shots. We have agreed to come back to it in a future conversation.
Paul noted the similarity to BCG vaccination, and Gus said people previously primed with BCG did even better. That led to a point Gus made often during the pandemic: people who had already had COVID had broad natural immunity, and in his view vaccinating them added nothing and may have done harm.
Where did all the beds go?
Paul turned to this winter’s flu headlines. In his view it was the ordinary winter flu arriving a little early, but the NHS still struggled. Profiteering from Doom tries to explain why.
At its founding in 1948, he said, the NHS had about 480,000 beds, taken over without compensation from local authorities, which ran around two-thirds of hospitals, and charities, which ran the rest. Today he puts the figure at about 120,000. Meanwhile the population has grown from roughly 50 million to nearly 70 million, and there are now more people over 60 than under 20.
As a radiologist who worked on early MRI and CT, Paul acknowledges that imaging transformed care. A suspected case of multiple sclerosis that once meant a week in hospital can now be settled with a single scan. Ultrasound and imaging made keyhole surgery possible. “Now the only problem is,” he said, “none of it helps people with flu.” Flu needs beds, rest and nursing, and hospitals once aimed for about 70% occupancy to absorb the winter surge, today it is far higher of course.
What went with the beds were the convalescent homes, cottage hospitals, geriatric and psychiatric hospitals. The people who bear the cost, we agreed, are those with psychiatric illness.
It struck a nerve with me. I once worked in Strathclyde House in Carlisle, built with Victorian public subscription and meant to last centuries, demolished in a reorganisation. Paul’s own story was worse: in the 1980s he raised £4.25 million, much of it through small donations and gigs with his band Dr Jazz, to build an MRI centre. The building has since been sold off for an upmarket housing estate.
Profiteering from Doom
The new book widens the lens. Gus described a “blueprint” from the COVID years and I asked whether it had been applied elsewhere. The chapter list answers that: criminals and dictators, drug dealing, slavery and people trafficking, extortion, online crime, tobacco, gambling, the use of fear, war and the military-industrial complex, bankers and the hugely wealthy, managerial processes, the charity sector, the welfare state, dentistry, abuse directed at scientists, avian influenza and the COVID story.
Paul chose a chapter I had skipped over: the ethics of artificial intelligence, written with Sanjay Gandhi. Back in the 1990s Paul worked with the late Barry Thomas, who went on to develop the AI behind number-plate cameras. “So when you get done for speeding,” Paul joked, “it was his fault.”
Together they used AI to read head MRI scans long before it was fashionable. The aim was never to replace radiologists but to flag things for them. Sanjay’s work shows why: a system trained only on small lung nodules can miss a huge one simply because it is bigger than anything in its training set. No radiologist would miss it.
Paul showed me his cartoon from the chapter: a judge scolding a barrister for invented case law, and the barrister apologising on behalf of “my assistant, ChatGPT”. It has happened for real several times.
I have my own grievance: AI-generated fakes of my voice, even lip-synced videos, are circulating online. Paul admitted using AI in his marketing too, but only a George Washington who “cannot tell a lie” about The Death of Science. If you use fakes, he said, make them obviously fake.
Will AI take over the world? Only, Paul said, if we let the very rich control it and grow richer while everyone else grows poorer. The nearest danger is already here, in the drones over Ukraine.
Cock-ups, not conspiracies
Here the two professors parted company, which they clearly enjoyed. Paul is not a great believer in conspiracies. Most people, he said, are not clever enough to run one; what looks like conspiracy is usually people covering up mistakes.
Gus is less sure. Having sat through vaccine meetings since the early days of HIV, when a vaccine was promised within 18 months more than 40 years ago, he feels he was “preached at”. Those who questioned the orthodoxy, he said, tended to disappear from the field.
Both see the same pattern around climate change. The “high priests”, Paul said, are often broadcasters or people profiting from wind and solar, and critics are dismissed as fossil-fuel shills. (For the record, neither has taken a penny from that industry.) Trees matter, Paul argued, not as carbon sinks but as the planet’s air conditioners through transpiration. Yet we fell forests in North America to ship across the Atlantic and burn in power stations, and call it saving the planet.
He is equally scathing about taking farmland out of production for rewilding while importing food grown on cleared land abroad. Rewilded fields, he said, mostly become bramble patches. His alternative is allotments, where people pay to grow food and pollinators thrive.
On my own allotment I can sit and watch the bees on the comfrey for hours. Gus was alarmed by reports of allotments being eyed for housing.
That led the conversation to food insecurity. Gus cited an article claiming Britain went into the Second World War with six weeks of food in reserve and today holds about six days. Cut the supply chains and the shelves empty, as they did in 2020.
Paul’s last warning was about cash. In Spain once, the card networks failed for a day; ATMs and restaurant terminals stopped and people milled about wondering how to eat. Luckily, he had some cash. Even one day, he said, was enough for people to start rioting. Keep using cash.
Until next time
It was a sprawling conversation, and I make no apology for that. As I told viewers, if it felt a little disorganised, get the books: it’s all in neat chapters. “Well, we had fun,” Paul said. “That’s the point.”
Both have promised to return. Paul will take us through the history of plagues, and Gus will talk about cancer treatments and preventive measures that patients cannot yet get, before we even reach repurposed drugs….
The Death of Science and Profiteering from Doom by Professors Paul Goddard and Angus Dalgleish are available now.
source johninengland.substack.com