By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

Nephrologist Drummond Rennie died on 12 September 2025, aged 89. He was deputy editor at the New England Journal of Medicine and at JAMA, for a total of 36 years.

Drummond's key interest was to improve the quality of medical research. He made numerous outstanding contributions to science and received the 2008 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for promoting integrity in scientific research and publishing and for defending scientific freedom in the face of efforts to suppress research.

Drummond's sense of humour was also outstanding. He told me that he was highly astonished to get an award from the biggest scientific association in the US, which publishes Science: "In my short acceptance speech, I thanked the pharmaceutical industry and my corrupt clinical colleagues for writing my scripts."

Drummond was keenly aware of the dark side of science. When he, in 1986, conceived of and announced the first Peer Review Congress to subject peer review to scientific scrutiny and improve its quality, he wrote:

"There are scarcely any bars to eventual publication. There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print."

I met Drummond for the first time at the second Peer Review Congress in Chicago in 1993. The same year, I cofounded the Cochrane Collaboration and opened the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. Drummond was very supportive and became a director of the San Francisco Branch of the US Cochrane Center. We were frustrated that most of the medical literature was unreliable and our mission was to publish critical systematic reviews of trials of the benefits and harms of interventions in healthcare.

Drummond described the old type of a scientific review as being the opinion of a pundit, panjandrum, poohbah, nabob, or lord high executioner, and when the BMJ asked us for advice about a conflicts of interest issue, he noted that if I disagreed with him, he would eat his hat publicly in Tavistock Square "and out in rural Oregon, it's a pretty big hat." I told him he didn't need to eat his hat, which relieved him, "especially as I'd have had to buy the cowboy hat first."

Pfizer's Fraud with Its Antifungal Agent

In 1998, my wife, professor of clinical microbiology Helle Krogh Johansen, and I found out that Pfizer, one of the most criminal drug companies in the world, had rigged a series of trials of their antifungal agent, fluconazole, and we submitted our revelations to JAMA.

Drummond found it uncomfortable and could blush if people praised him, but he was not shy of praising other people. He found our paper "excellent," "wonderful," and "famous," and said he was "very happy to be associated with two such good scientists, and two such brave, open, and honest people." Drummond had these qualities himself.

Pfizer had combined the results for amphotericin B with those for nystatin in a "polyene" group even though it was well known that nystatin is ineffective in patients with cancer complicated by neutropenia. Drummond asked us to confirm this, which we did in a meta-analysis. Moreover, most patients received amphotericin B orally even though it was known that it is poorly absorbed and should only be used intravenously.

It was also unclear if some patients were counted more than once, as the data were sliced and published several times, and as the reports were obscure. The primary investigators didn't answer our questions but referred us to Pfizer which didn't answer them either.

Drummond and I discussed the paper's legal implications at a meeting in Oxfo...