Where by alcohol industry lobbyists he means other scientists (who have advised the British government on alcohol in the past), and one guy who works for a free market think tank. He appears to have simply made up the connection to the alcohol industry.<p>Meanwhile this researcher is directly funded by the anti-alcohol lobby, which he denies by saying that <i>yes</i> he was the president of a temperance society for years and <i>yes</i> he gets paid to speak at temperance meetings, but because he's not a member of those societies, he's not technically a paid lobbyist. That's a non-sequitur: he is in fact the only alcohol-related lobbyist in this whole dispute.<p>Good for the critics! Epidemiology is full of outright fake science and they hate it when anyone points that out, the "you're not one of us" reaction is totally standard for this group. The scientific criticism of this work is that it's based on a classic correlation-implies-causation fallacy, and that he cherry-picked six studies out of 107 available. His response to this is that only six studies were "high quality", so his own field produces unusable trash-quality papers 95% of the time!<p>This isn't a surprising admission. Alcohol related epidemiology has been pseudo-science driven by a thirst for power and status for literally decades:<p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/22/drinking_made_it_all_up/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/22/drinking_made_it_all_...</a> (2007)<p><i>Safe drinking guidelines 'plucked out of the air'<p>The UK government's guidelines on how much it is safe to drink are based on numbers "plucked out of the air" by a committee that met in 1987.<p>According to The Times newspaper, the limits are not based on any science whatsoever, rather "a feeling that you had to say something" about what would be a safe drinking level.<p>This is all according to Richard Smith, a member of the Royal College of Physicians working party who produced the guidelines.<p>He told the newspaper that doctors were concerned about mounting evidence that heavy long term drinking does cause serious health problems. But that the committee's epidemiologist had acknowledged at the time that there was "no data", and that "it's impossible to say what's safe and what isn't".</i>