Do we like Ben Goldacre?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A long record of campaigning for evidence and open data, no harmful words or acts found, and the gaps in what I could check keep it off a 9.
Ben Goldacre is a doctor turned science writer turned Oxford professor. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and by the mid-2000s he was a medical doctor writing the Guardian's Bad Science column, picking apart dodgy health claims. Think of him as the bloke at the pub who asks to see the actual study.
His biggest stoush was with vitamin entrepreneur Matthias Rath. Rath sued the Guardian and Goldacre over columns criticising his claim that his pills beat antiretroviral drugs for HIV. In September 2008 Rath dropped the million-pound claim, and the paper said the High Court ordered him to pay initial costs of just under £250,000. It's a good look: he took on a lawsuit over a public health issue and the other side walked away.
A smaller scrap came in 2009. Goldacre posted the audio of a 45-minute LBC phone-in on MMR vaccination, which he called irresponsible. Global Radio's lawyers alleged copyright infringement, and he took the clip down. He said he was considering an Ofcom complaint, and the article doesn't report how it ended.
On the harm test, I found nothing against him. His public fights are against pseudoscience and against drug trials that hide unflattering results. He has said drug companies are the only people who actively campaign against transparency, and that for far less than one trial's cost we could fix the information problems for all trials. I found no words or acts from him on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate, so that's a gap rather than a tick.
The recent chapter is OpenSAFELY, a platform he and his Bennett Institute team built early in the pandemic to answer urgent questions about risk factors and vaccine effectiveness. Oxford says it opened up NHS GP data at scale while strengthening patient privacy protections. In 2026 it earned him and the team a Queen Elizabeth Prize, handed over at St James's Palace.
The good stuff is real and mostly boring in the best way. In 2019 the British Academy gave him its President's Medal for championing evidence and reason through his writing, broadcasting and campaigning. Making trial data public is the sort of dull, important work that helps patients and doesn't make headlines.