Cochrane HPV vaccine review: BMJ journal defends “inconvenient criticisms”

Journals shouldn’t shrink from offering criticisms that may be considered inconvenient, say the editors of a BMJ journal in the latest round of a dispute over the quality of a Cochrane review.

Carl Heneghan and Igho Onakpoya, editors of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, make no apology for having published a paper that criticised the conduct of an important Cochrane review of vaccines for human papilloma virus,12 which have been widely adopted around the world to protect against cervical cancer.

The criticisms, which included the claim that 20 studies were not …